Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Annabelle Comes Home, which airs on HBO tonight at 8:10 p.m. ET, is the seventh film in The Conjuring franchise. If you’ve seen any of the Conjuring or Annabelle movies, you probably know the drill at this point: There’s a possessed doll named Annabelle and “demonologists” Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) have been trying for seven years to exorcise it. The darned thing just keeps coming back!
In 2019’s Annabelle Comes Home director Gary Dauberman introduces a new factor: A little girl. Specifically, the Warrens’ little girl, Judy Warren. And this little girl is played by 13-year-old child actor Mckenna Grace, because, it seems, every little girl is these days.
To be clear, I’m not mad about it. Mckenna Grace is an excellent actor. I mean, Gifted, that movie where she plays Chris Evans’s super smart niece? She was phenomenal, and I’m not just saying that because her character gave us peak Hot Father Figure Chris Evans. But if you start paying attention, you’ll realize that if a script calls for a younger version of a white female lead, more often than not, that little girl is Mckenna Grace.
A young Margot Robbie in I, Tonya? That’s Mckenna Grace. A young Brie Larson in Captain Marvel? It’s your girl Mckenna Grace. A young Candice King in The Vampire Diaries? You better believe that’s Mckenna Grace. A young Emma Swan in Once Upon a Time, a young Theodora Crain in The Haunting of House Hill, and young Sabrina Spellman in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina? Every single one of them is played by Mckenna Grace!
And younger versions of adult blond women are not the only kind of little girl Grace plays. You can catch her as Penny Kirkman on Designated Survivor, Rose Harbenberger on Fuller House, Paige on Young Sheldon, and as the star of her very own quirky little girl movie, Troop Zero, a Little Miss Sunshine-esque comedy from Amazon Studios that began streaming last month. With Annabelle Comes Home, Grace can check “little girl in a horror movie,” off her list of little girl film roles, and next up she will star in the new Ghostbusters film alongside fellow child star Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things)—who are rumored to be playing the grandchildren of Harold Ramis’s character from the original Ghostbusters—so she’s got the sci-fi little girl on lock, too.
At this point, Grace has a monopoly on the little girl roles of Hollywood, much like Dakota Fanning in the early 2000s. Hey, she’s earned it. You go Mckenna Grace, Hollywood’s No. 1 little girl.
