Top 13 McKenna Grace Movies, Ranked

There’s a moment in Gifted where a seven-year-old girl stares down a courtroom full of adults and doesn’t blink. That’s McKenna Grace in a nutshell: a performer who has never once looked like she’s acting. She started booking dramatic roles before most kids her age were picking electives, and she’s built a filmography that ranges from horror franchises to billion-dollar blockbusters to quiet indie gems that deserved bigger audiences. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by one standard: how completely she disappeared into the character and how long the performance stayed with us after the credits rolled. Thirteen films, one genuinely singular talent.

13. Spirit Untamed (2021)

Abigail Stone is the loyal best friend, the warm presence at the edge of the frame, the one who cheers and worries and shows up, and Grace voices her with real sweetness, bringing a bright, bubbly energy to Abigail’s lines that keeps the character from feeling like pure function. There’s a lightness to her delivery in the early friendship scenes that makes you root for the duo even when the story around them feels thin. The film, a loose spin-off of the beloved Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, struggled to connect with audiences, with most critics noting it couldn’t quite fill the shoes of its source material. Grace does her job well here, but Abigail doesn’t give her much to push against, which is why this one sits at the bottom of the list.

12. How to Be a Latin Lover (2017)

Arden is a kid who sees through the nonsense the adults around her are pulling, and Grace plays that clarity with a dry, knowing quality that lands every time she’s on screen. She’s working in broad comedy here, trading scenes with Eugenio Derbez in a crowd-pleasing film that found a real audience at the box office. There’s a specific beat where Arden sizes up Derbez’s character with this flat, unimpressed look that gets a laugh precisely because Grace commits to it without winking at the audience. It’s a supporting role in a crowd-pleasing comedy, not a dramatic showcase, but it showed early on that she had real comic timing and could hold her own in an ensemble built around a very different kind of star.

11. Frankenstein (2015)

Elizabeth, as played by a young McKenna Grace, carries scenes that ask for something most child actors can’t access: a quiet, interior sadness that doesn’t tip into performance. This modern retelling is a limited-release curiosity that most casual fans haven’t tracked down, but anyone who digs into Grace’s early filmography tends to come away from it caught off guard. There’s a stillness she brings to Elizabeth in the scenes where the character is processing grief that feels instinctive rather than coached. The dramatic instincts on display here, the ability to hold a moment without filling it with unnecessary movement or expression, are the same ones that would make Gifted work two years later. It’s a fascinating early chapter.

10. Anniversary (2025)

Birdie is a different register than most of what Grace has done before, and it’s early, but the early response has been specific enough to earn it a spot. Where her earlier roles often asked her to be the smartest or most resilient person in the room, Birdie demands something rawer, and Grace apparently leans into that without hedging. The detail that keeps coming up is a late-film confrontation where Birdie unravels in near-silence — no big speech, no tears pushed to the surface, just Grace holding the camera’s attention through stillness alone, hands loose at her sides, jaw set, saying nothing and meaning everything. That’s the kind of specific thing that’s hard to dismiss.

9. Malignant (2021)

Young Madison appears in flashback sequences that have to do a lot of heavy lifting: they need to plant the seeds of something deeply wrong before the audience knows what they’re looking for. Grace threads that needle carefully, playing the character with a specific kind of frightened confusion that feels authentic rather than generically scared-kid. The moment where young Madison is thrown against the wall and left crumpled in the corner of the frame is difficult to sit through, partly because of how physically committed the performance is. James Wan’s film has built a passionate cult following since its release, and those flashback scenes are a real part of why the mythology lands when the third act finally detonates. It’s a small role, but she makes it count.

8. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie (2023)

Skye gets more to do in this installment than in most PAW Patrol outings, and Grace’s voice work leans into the character’s mix of sweetness and determination with a warmth that kids respond to immediately. There’s a sequence where Skye has to push through her fear to use her new powers, and Grace pitches the emotional beats just right: not melodramatic, not dismissive, but fully present in a way that makes the moment land for the younger audience this film is built for. The movie pulled in over $130 million worldwide and became a genuine event for families, with kids dragging parents back for repeat viewings — the kind of real audience connection that doesn’t happen unless the characters feel alive. That fear-to-courage turn from Skye, delivered with just a slight catch in Grace’s voice before the breakthrough, is exactly why it stuck.

7. Regretting You (2025)

Clara Grant is McKenna Grace’s first real foothold in the Colleen Hoover cinematic universe, and the performance signals something worth paying attention to: she’s actively working to reach a different audience than the one that grew up with her. The role asks for a more grounded, emotionally open kind of vulnerability than horror or sci-fi tends to require, and Grace meets that ask in the scenes where Clara is navigating the messy fallout of family grief and first love simultaneously. It’s not a perfect film, but the moment where Clara finally stops holding it together and just lets herself cry feels like the emotional core the whole story was building toward, and Grace earns it completely.

6. Captain Marvel (2019)

The young Carol Danvers doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but Grace makes every second of it count. The go-kart crash sequence, where Carol hits the dirt, takes a breath, and gets back up before anyone can tell her to stay down, is the emotional spine of the film, and it works because Grace plays the stubbornness as completely natural rather than heroic. She’s not performing resilience; she’s just being a kid who refuses to accept the outcome. For a film that needed its flashback sequences to do real thematic work, casting Grace was the right call. Her brief presence gives the adult version of the character a foundation that feels earned, and that’s a harder thing to pull off in a supporting role than it looks.

5. Troop Zero (2019)

Christmas Flint is a weirdo in the best possible sense: a NASA-obsessed, fiercely independent misfit in rural Georgia who decides the best way to get her voice heard by the universe is to win a Birdie Scout competition. Grace plays her with a specific kind of earnest intensity. There’s a scene where Christmas delivers a heartfelt speech about her dreams for the future that is so nakedly sincere it’s almost uncomfortable to watch, and that’s exactly why it works. Every critic who reviewed Troop Zero pointed to her performance as the film’s biggest asset, and they weren’t wrong. Its streaming-only release kept it from finding the audience it deserved, but this is the underrated gem on this list, and Christmas Flint is a character Grace clearly loved playing.

4. Annabelle Comes Home (2019)

Judy Warren carries the weight of a very specific kind of loneliness: she’s the daughter of the most famous paranormal investigators in America, which means no one at school will come to her birthday party and the artifacts locked in her parents’ room are a constant, ambient threat. Grace plays that isolation with a quiet dignity that keeps Judy from becoming a passive horror-movie victim. The scene where she sits alone at her own birthday party, trying to hold it together, hits harder than most of the film’s jump scares because Grace doesn’t oversell it. She just sits there, and that’s enough. Annabelle Comes Home is her biggest solo box office hit, and she anchors it with a steadiness that a lot of adult actors couldn’t manage in the same material.

3. I, Tonya (2017)

Young Tonya Harding has to establish everything the film needs you to believe about the adult version before Margot Robbie takes over, and Grace does it without ever feeling like a preview. She plays the bruising home life and the ice rink defiance as two sides of the same survival instinct, and there’s a specific scene where a young Tonya skates through a routine while her mother watches with that particular combination of pride and cruelty that Grace navigates with real precision. In a film stacked with powerhouse adult performances, she fits seamlessly into the ensemble and holds her own alongside company that would intimidate most actors twice her age. It’s a supporting role in the year’s most talked-about sports drama, and she holds her corner of it without flinching.

2. Ghostbusters: Afterlife / Frozen Empire (2021–2024) — Phoebe Spengler

Phoebe Spengler is socially awkward, scientifically brilliant, and completely unable to read a room, and Grace plays all of that with a deadpan specificity that makes the character feel like a real kid rather than a quirky archetype. In Afterlife, the scene where Phoebe first fires a proton pack and her face cycles through terror, exhilaration, and pure focus in about three seconds is the moment the franchise revival clicks into place. Frozen Empire gave her more complicated emotional territory, and Grace handles Phoebe’s frustration at being sidelined with a tight-jawed restraint that’s more convincing than any amount of crying would have been — you feel the effort it takes Phoebe to hold herself together, which is exactly right for this character.

1. Gifted (2017)

Mary Adler is seven years old, doing college-level mathematics, and fighting a custody battle she didn’t ask for, and Grace plays all of it with a matter-of-fact emotional honesty that keeps the film from feeling like a tearjerker, grounding it instead as a document of a real kid figuring out where she belongs. The courtroom scene, where Mary listens to adults argue about her future with a face holding grief and anger and love all at once, is the kind of acting that makes you forget you’re watching a performance. There’s also a quieter moment: Mary explaining to her uncle why she doesn’t want to be special, just normal, delivered without any bid for sympathy, and that restraint is what makes the whole film land. Grace picked up several awards recognition for the role, including critics’ circle wins and award nominations, and all of it was deserved. More than any other film on this list, Gifted is the one people bring up when they want to explain what she’s capable of, and Mary Adler remains the performance everything else in her career gets measured against.

Grace already has a filmography that spans horror franchises, big-budget Marvel blockbusters, and quiet indie dramas that critics loved and audiences underserved. On the TV side, her work in The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Young Sheldon (2018–2023), and The Handmaid’s Tale (2021–2022) follows the same pattern: she finds the human center of every role and stays there, no matter how big or strange the world around her gets.