'Being killed off in Lost is still my worst heartbreak'

Maggie Grace, star of the kidnap thriller Taken’, sits down with Adam White to talk about her love for England, playing damsels in distress, and how women’s roles have moved on

- Adam White

If you were a fictional blonde woman in the Noughties who was chased, abducted, shot at or maimed, you were probably played by Maggie Grace. Between the blockbuster puzzle box series Lost, where she played rich-girl-with-regrets Shannon Rutherford, and Taken, in which she was Liam Neeson’s eternally kidnapped daughter, Grace cornered the market in damsels in new-millennium distress.

For a bookworm and self-described Jane Austen nerd who grew up on tales of multifaceted women deft at shaking loose the shackles of the patriarchy, this was... tricky.

“I don’t know if I had an essence of fragility to me,” the 40-yearold says today, slowly, softly and, dare I say it, with a slight fragility to her. “But that was just what was available [back then], and how we saw young women. I mostly played rape victims for a living for at least the first half of my career.” She winces a bit. “So it’s really heartening to see a lot of younger female parts now having more agency, and moving the story forward.”

Grace, in the last decade or so, has evolved past the women-inperil characters, annihilating zombies in Fear the Walking Dead and battling tornados in the action movie Hurricane Heist. Her transformations become even more impressive once you speak to her – she admits to being an introvert, both before fame and very much during it, and over Zoom she has positioned her camera a bit higher than one normally might for an interview like this. It means she sits at the lower right-hand corner of the frame, her face sometimes disappearing from it entirely.

That shrinking quality is used to great effect in Grace’s new movie, a British psychological thriller called Blackwater Lane.