For Fans of Heather Graham

The Girl Who Sees Through Everything

Heather Graham occupies a peculiar, underappreciated corner of American cinema. She arrived fully formed in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy as Nadine, a teenage runaway whose sweetness barely masks her recklessness, and from that first appearance you could sense the thing that would define her career: an ability to play wide open and knowingly guarded at exactly the same time.

She became a fixture in the 1990s and 2000s Hollywood ecosystem, cycling through comedies, crime films, and a few unclassifiable oddities that revealed a genuine appetite for risk. Paul Thomas Anderson cast her as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, and the role crystallized what Graham does best: she plays characters who have constructed a persona to survive the world, and she makes you feel the construction without ever puncturing it. The comedy came naturally too. Her turns in the Austin Powers films, The Hangover, and Bowfinger showed a light touch and pitch-perfect timing that Hollywood never quite figured out what to do with.

The through-line for a Graham fan is a taste for work that lives in the overlap between the sun-drenched and the seedy, the funny and the melancholy. These are stories set in worlds where people want things badly, perform confidence they may not feel, and occasionally get exactly what they asked for, which turns out to be complicated. She also stepped behind the camera for Half Magic in 2018, a screwball feminist comedy she wrote and directed herself, which suggests her sensibility runs deeper than the roles she was handed.