Steven Spielberg’s films are proof that there is no such thing as “small parts.” With “Jaws,” the famed director immortalized the late deep sea diver Susan Backlinie when she played the great white shark’s first victim in a scene that gave millions of moviegoers nightmares.
Now, with “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp turned to Courtney Grace, a former broadcast journalist-turned-actor, to return to her news roots to deliver the emotional climax their entire film is building towards.
In the final minutes of “Disclosure Day,” Grace plays an unnamed NBC News anchor who gets the breaking news of a lifetime when the film’s protagonists Margaret and Daniel, played by Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, reveal to the world secret government footage of decades of alien encounters, including footage of extraterrestrial corpses being pulled from ship wreckage.
As restrained and suspenseful music from John Williams plays in the background, the NBC anchor tries her best to describe what she is seeing, but is overcome with emotion as she realizes what she is seeing and the society-shaking implications sink in. By the end of the scene, she turns to the camera and tells everyone watching with a tremulous voice, “If you are watching this … you are not alone.”
When Grace spoke to TheWrap, she was all smiles after what has been a whirlwind week. Since the release of “Disclosure Day,” Grace says that her social media accounts have been filled with glowing praise from the film’s fans, some of whom have placed her one-scene, show-stealing performance alongside Blunt’s leading turn as a weather reporter imbued with mysterious alien powers.
“Never in a million years did I think my name would be associated with one of the greats! Emily Blunt? That’s unbelievable!” she said with excitement.
Grace’s time in the spotlight is even more of a shock because she had no idea it was coming. Having jumped from reporting to acting just a couple years ago, Grace got her start playing TV reporter roles in shows like Paramount+’s “Tulsa King” and the boxing biopic “Christy,” and has recently landed a recurring role on the latest season of the Netflix romance series “Sweet Magnolias.”
But “Disclosure Day” was an opportunity that initially seemed like it had eluded her, as Grace had auditioned for another role in the film and didn’t get it. But casting director Cindy Tolin, who brought “West Side Story” leads Rachel Zegler and Oscar winner Ariana DeBose to Spielberg, kept Grace in mind and asked if she wanted to come in to play an NBC anchor.
“I got there, and they were shooting two scenes at once. There was the control room scene, and then I was being filmed in a separate room a couple floors up,” she explained. “We first did a shot where I was seen but not heard on the screens in the control room, and then they turned my sound on and I did my first take.”
The larger context of her scene within the film was not disclosed to Grace, who was simply handed the two pages of the screenplay containing her monologue. While Spielberg worked with O’Connor and the other actors on the scene where the classified government footage is broadcast to the world from the KCXE control room, Grace filmed her scenes with an AD upstairs.
But when Spielberg saw footage of Grace’s performance as an anchor slowly choking up at the realization that alien beings are on Earth, he was so impressed that he decided to work with her directly. A few moments later, Grace found herself working one-on-one with the highest grossing filmmaker in cinema history.
“I was just prepared to listen, to take notes and any direction to give the scene he needed. Instead, he just gave me encouragement,” Grace recalled. “I just wept! There’s no world in which I would have thought that my work would have resonated in the way that it did to Steven Spielberg!”
Grace has come a long way to get to this moment. Being an actor was a childhood dream for her, but stage anxiety gripped her from a young age. Despite her love for acting, she struggled to get the words out when trying out for roles in school plays at her elementary school.
“I was stuttering. I couldn’t read the words, and I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this,’” Grace said. “But I always wanted to tell stories, so I ended up going into journalism where I could put a spotlight on people who deserve to have a spotlight put on them.”
And seven years of work in front of a camera helped her overcome her anxiety, training with producers to improve her delivery as an anchor and working her way up to a job in Tampa, Florida. Finally, in 2024, Grace decided she had waited long enough to pursue her original dream and went into acting, but she thinks she wouldn’t have gotten to this point if she hadn’t gone into reporting first.
“It’s really about communication skills. That’s the big thing reporting and acting have in common,” she said. “And just having years and years where I was allowed to practice that over and over with producers who were honest with me about where I stood and gave me the space and the tools to get better. That continued when I finally decided to pursue acting, because I was able to find a great support network of mentors and coaches who brought me into environments where I could absorb and learn from people.”
Months passed after the two days that Grace got to work on “Disclosure Day” with Spielberg, until the film’s release this past week. Grace went to a New York cast and crew screening of the film, eager to see where exactly her one scene would pop up in the film so she could tell her friends and family where to look for her.
She thought that she might show up in the film about a half-hour in. Thirty minutes passed. Then 40 minutes. An hour. Ninety minutes. Car chases ensued. Secrets were slowly revealed. But still no Courtney Grace in a newsroom.
“It was like riding two rollercoasters at once. The rollercoaster that was the movie itself, and the rollercoaster of realizing what my role was in it.”
And when Grace finally saw herself on the big screen in the film’s final minutes, she said she was “shaking in her seat” realizing what Spielberg had entrusted to her.
“I am deeply, deeply honored that he had picked me for that role and worked so closely with me on it, and I’m glad he didn’t tell me the whole story on set,” she said.
While Spielberg filmed shots of people on subways and airplanes glued to their phones, watching as proof of alien life is shown to eight billion people all at once, it is the NBC anchor whose reaction takes center stage. Spielberg uses it to ask the audience what they would do in a situation where everything they thought they knew about the world was turned upside down.
On Instagram, Grace posted a picture of her with Spielberg and Koepp after she finished shooting her scene, telling TheWrap that she hopes her message of gratitude makes its way to them.
“I just want to thank him for believing in me and seeing me as someone through who he could share his message to the world.”
The post ‘Disclosure Day’ Gave Former News Anchor Courtney Grace Its Most Emotional Moment, and She Didn’t Even Know It appeared first on TheWrap.
