“Disclosure Day,” the latest alien blockbuster from Steven Spielberg, is in its second weekend at the box office and online audiences can’t stop talking about breakout actor and former TV news anchor Courtney Grace.
Grace plays an NBC anchor who, in a pivotal scene in the movie, learns mid-broadcast of the existence of aliens. She actually filmed her scenes at 30 Rock.
“When I got there and I sat behind that desk, it was this full circle moment that I thought, not in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought that this opportunity would bring me to this opportunity,” Grace told NBC New York this week. “And so it was very surreal. It felt like coming home in so many ways.”
It was on that set where she met Spielberg for the very first time, after she had already started filming her scenes.
“He came and he shook my hand. And I can’t remember his exact words, and I don’t want to speak for him. But the moral of it was, he was moved by what I what I did and he encouraged me to keep doing it,” she recalled.
Grace spent several years working as a reporter and anchor before ultimately hanging up the career to pursue acting full time. But it was those years of reporting, she said, that helped her deliver what she would later find out was one of the movie’s most emotional, climatic scenes.
“I will confidently say that if I was not a journalist before this, I don’t think I would have been able to deliver what needed to be delivered in that scene,” she said.
Late into the movie, Grace’s character is interrupted during a live broadcast to report on the release of decades of alien footage, shared by characters played by Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor. Grace said she was only given a couple pages of the script, so she didn’t know until the movie’s premiere in New York how her scene would fit into the rest of the film.
“My heart was beating, my palms were sweating, and I was shaking in that seat when I watched it for the first time,” she said.
The wait more than paid off. Grace’s performance has caught the attention of the internet, with many praising her work and others taking the moment to turn her character’s reaction into a meme.