Mckenna Grace

In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024), Phoebe Spengler plays chess with Melody, and Mckenna Grace lets us see how lonely she is. We were moved because she makes the need for company so plain. Emily Alyn Lind’s patient Melody gives her somebody to sit with, and Grace does not overstate the relief. These are quiet scenes in a film that keeps interrupting its younger characters to welcome back the old team. They are also the clearest reason we have to rate Grace.

Her breakthrough lead in Gifted (2017) established her as a convincing precocious child, with comic timing as well as emotional control. Playing young Tonya Harding in I, Tonya (2017) belonged to another recurring line of work: younger versions of central characters. The lead as Emma Grossman in The Bad Seed (2018) put that self-possession to more unsettling use. She took on Phoebe in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), returning to the part in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

Gil Kenan gives those chess scenes room, and his collaborators know when to quieten down. Eric Steelberg lights Melody in cold blue, while Dario Marianelli reduces the score to a few strings. In the opening chase, editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid keep the geography clear as Phoebe works from the gunner’s seat. The chase is good fun, but the chess scenes give Grace more to play.

There is little of that opportunity in Scream 7 (2026). Kevin Williamson gives Grace’s Hannah Thurman a place among the suspects, but the younger ensemble get costumes and grudges instead of much character. We cannot fairly call that a failure of her acting when the part offers so little to assess. Voicing Skye in the 2026 PAW Patrol dinosaur film offers no stronger case for choosing a film on her name alone. Cal Brunker’s thinly written animation is no place to discover what Grace can do.