Rachel Emily Nichols (born January 8, 1980) is an
American model turned
actress, best known for her portrayal of
CIA officer
Rachel Gibson on the
ABC television series
Alias. She has also starred in several films, including
Dumb & Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd,
The Amityville Horror,
The Woods,
Star Trek, and
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
Early life, college and modeling
The daughter of Jim and Alison Nichols, Nichols was born and raised in
Augusta,
Kennebec County, Maine. She attended
Cony High School, where she competed in the
high jump.
As a
sophomore at Cony, she studied abroad in France. Nichols admitted to
Latino Review that she "wasn't the hot chick" in high school, referring to herself instead as a "late bloomer".
Upon graduating in 1998, she headed to
Columbia University in New York City, intent on studying
psychology. While growing up, Nichols enjoyed trekking through the outdoors and loved windsurfing, sailing and "just being on the water".
According to Nichols, she stumbled into modeling accidentally: "I was in the right place at the right time and decided to give modeling a try."
While posing for companies like
Guess? and
Abercrombie & Fitch, she also enrolled in drama classes at Columbia. She maintained a difficult schedule throughout college, balancing her studies in New York City with photo shoots in Europe. In 2002, Nichols decided to really pursue acting in earnest.
Acting career
At first, Nichols appeared in various television shows in bit parts. Her first auditioned role, which she won, was that of an
orgy-loving restaurant hostess in a 2002 episode of
Sex and the City, but later that year she won the role of Jessica, the dogged school-newspaper reporter, in
Dumb and Dumberer. She left Columbia midway through her last semester to shoot the picture, but still managed to graduate on time despite the demanding modeling schedule. She wrote two term papers and took the final exam of her undergraduate career just days before shipping all of her things to
Atlanta, where
Dumberer was being filmed. Although
Dumberer was ultimately a flop, the exposure it provided earned Nichols roles in the television series
Line of Fire, plus the 2005
horror films
The Amityville Horror and
The Woods. In 2003, she also starred in Bon Jovi's
All About Lovin' You music video.
In 2004,
FOX planned to develop a series vaguely reminiscent of their first hit drama,
21 Jump Street. They enlisted Todd and Glenn Kessler (of
Robbery Homicide Division) to create the show, tentatively named
The Inside. The Kesslers cast Nichols as a 22-year-old federal agent who impersonates a high-school girl in an undercover operation; they also cast
Fastlanes Peter Facinelli and model Willa Holland, and shot a pilot. The pilot underwhelmed studio execs, though, and FOX brought in Angel writer Tim Minear to re-tool the concept. Minear ended up radically changing the show's story and purging the entire cast — save for Nichols, who remained the show's centerpiece. While some sources said that Nichols was kept on because FOX pressured Minear to do so, Minear stood by a different story: "Even if [1] wasn't already living in this show when I got there I'd have cast her. [2] a star in the making, I feel. And an unspoiled delight..." he told Variety.
The new concept more closely echoed
The Silence of the Lambs than
Jump Street, and Nichols's character had been dramatically altered as well: now she was rookie Special Agent Rebecca Locke, assigned to Los Angeles'
FBI Violent Crimes Unit, an elite group of criminal
profilers charged with tracking the city's most dangerous deviants. Another of Minear's new wrinkles was that Nichols's character now had a marked similarity to the back-story of
Elizabeth Smart, including a history of suffering, kidnapping, and abuse. The summer 2005 series received mixed reviews and a limited run, though the performances of Nichols (who says she "tested mostly for high school parts" before winning
The Insides dark lead role) and co-star Peter Coyote received generally favorable marks from critics.
After the failed FOX series, Nichols quickly found work on the
ABC series
Alias in the fall of 2005. Nichols portrayed
Rachel Gibson, a computer expert duped into thinking she works for the
CIA, when in fact she is working for a dangerous terrorist organization — a predicament not far removed from that of
Sydney Bristow in
Aliass first season. Discovering the truth, Nichols's character later joins the real CIA and becomes Bristow's protégé, complete with undercover missions and martial arts scenes, which Nichols had to work hard on to make appear realistic, struggling at first with the stunts.[|98413|1|,00.html Zap2it - TV news - Rachel Nichols Flies 'Solo' on 'Alias']
Although ABC announced the cancellation of
Alias effective in May 2006, Nichols's character was created as a possible replacement for series star
Jennifer Garner's Sydney, had the actress chosen to leave the show or scale back her involvement in the series (this, in fact, did begin to occur as the season progressed and Garner's real-life pregnancy prevented her from taking part in many action sequences). On May 22, 2006, Nichols appeared in
Alias final episode, "All the Time in the World".
After starring in two canceled television series in the last calendar year, Nichols turned her attention back to the big screen with two movies in 2007. The first,
Resurrecting the Champ, featured Nichols as the assistant to a sportswriter (
Josh Hartnett) who finds a former boxing legend (
Samuel L. Jackson) living homeless on the streets. The second,
P2, marked a return to the horror genre for Nichols, as she portrayed a businesswoman who gets trapped inside a public parking garage with a deranged security guard. In this role, Nichols refused to shoot any type of nudity, including sheer, wet tops. "In place of the nipples there's clearly a lot of cleavage," Nichols said in an interview, "so we made a compromise."
[P2's Rachel Nichols. Retrieved October 15, 2007.]
In 2007, Nichols also landed one of the leads in another
FOX series — the science fiction drama
Them, directed by
Jonathan Mostow, although the show ultimately was not picked up by the network. In 2009, Nichols appeared in
J. J. Abrams's
Star Trek in which she plays an
Orion cadet at
Starfleet Academy,
and starred in
Stephen Sommers'
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as
Shana "Scarlett" O'Hara.
Personal life
Nichols returns to her parents' home in Augusta, Maine, every
Christmas.
Nichols married
Scott Stuber on July 26, 2008, in
Aspen, Colorado. Stuber is a
Universal Studios producer and former vice chairman of Worldwide Production for
Universal Pictures. Nichols returned her hair to its natural
blonde color for the ceremony, having previously been a
redhead for her work in films. The couple
honeymooned in
Bora Bora, an island in
French Polynesia in the
South Pacific Ocean. As of 2008, they were building a home in
Cabo San Lucas,
Baja California Sur, Mexico. In February 2009, Nichols and Stuber separated due to irreconcilable differences.
Awards and nominations
Nichols was ranked #28 (2003) in Maxim's 100 Sexiest Women. She was nominated in 2005 for the Teen Choice Award at the
Teen Choice Awards for Choice Movie Scream Scene for
The Amityville Horror (2005) (Lisa screams as she's locked in the closet.). In 2006, she won the Best Ensemble Cast award at the
Method Fest for
Debating Robert Lee (2004), shared with
Daniel Letterle,
Billy Kay,
Kaley Cuoco,
Beau Bridges,
Brian Kerwin and
Melinda Dillon, and was nominated for the MTV Movie Award at the
MTV Movie Awards/
2006 MTV Movie Awards for Best Frightened Performance for
The Amityville Horror (2005).
Filmography
