Mr. Robot's Grace Gummer On Being Born Into Hollywood Royalty

Despite being born into Hollywood royalty, Grace Gummer did not set out to become an actress. But with two television shows shooting concurrently and barely enough time to celebrate her birthday, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

- Brian Moylan

Grace Gummer has a dentist appointment she absolutely cannot miss. She has a chipped tooth that is cutting the inside of her lower lip, and it hurts. If you ask her, she’ll show it to you, turning out her lip to display the tiny abrasion that’s causing so much discomfort. But it’s a particular kind of torture for someone who speaks for a living, and especially someone as busy as Gummer.

Two years ago, she was simultaneously filming roles as a scientist in CBS’s sci-fi head trip Extant and as a blogger on HBO’s drama The Newsroom. Currently, she’s wrapping up Mr. Robot, in which she plays a new character on the breakout hit’s second season, and is gearing up to play a young Nora Ephron in Good Girls Revolt, an Amazon series about women working at a newspaper in the late ‘60s. Gummer’s schedule is so hectic that she had to throw her recent 30th birthday party on a Sunday night. “I went a little bit crazy, but I wanted my friends to go crazy,” she says, sitting in a café near her home in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. “A lot of my friends have real jobs, so they were all tired at like 10:30.”

Tackling two roles simultaneously can be a lot more demanding than she originally anticipated. “I didn’t realize switching back and forth would be hard,” she says, noting that this is especially difficult on a show like Mr. Robot. “It’s really important to me to fully immerse myself. I think it’s such an interesting character where I’m surprising myself every day. Completely transforming into another person is weird.”