Maggie Grace stars in a new British thriller Blackwater Lane, and the actress reflects back on her career in her latest interview with The Independent. The actress would become known widely as Liam Neeson‘s daughter from Taken — who went on the fateful trip that led to her kidnapping, which in turn gave Neeson a second career as an action star. She also reflects on her time on the hit ABC TV drama Lost. Grace portrayed Shannon Rutherford on that island as the resident “rich-girl-with-regrets.” The J.J. Abrams-produced and written show had premiered 20 years ago, but Grace still calls her exit from it to be one of the most heartbreaking aspects of her career.
As Lost comes up in the conversation, the interviewer insists that what made Grace’s abrupt killing on the show shocking was that she seemed to be the heart of the early episodes and especially shocking as her arc seemingly would start to pick up at that time. “I thought they were gonna take her a little further,” Grace explains. When asked if she had wanted to leave the show, she exclaimed, “No!” Then, she stated, “It’s still the worst heartbreak of my career. I was devastated!” When she was inquired if she knows why they decided to kill her off, Grace replied, “Well, I mean, I do – [she] was sort of a caricature of white privilege before that was a phrase, you know? And maybe I was just too good at my assigned job of being incredibly annoying.”
The actress adds, “I thought maybe she would do something surprising, or have another color [to her personality]. Maybe she’d, at the last moment, redeem herself and be incredibly self-sacrificial in some way. I guess there were flashes of it, but not in the way I hoped in terms of an arc.” Grace would then try to put it in perspective, “That’s a selfish actor’s point of view. They definitely had bigger fish to fry.”
Grace’s new film Blackwater Lane also stars Minka Kelly and Dermot Mulroney. Blackwater Lane is based on author B.A. Paris’s bestselling novel The Breakdown. The film will center on a woman, played by Kelly, who drives by a stranded motorist later revealed to have been murdered. After a series of terrifying events, the woman becomes convinced she is the killer’s next victim while her husband, played by Mulroney, and her best friend, played by Grace, worry about her sanity.