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After stints on Sons of Anarchy, Jericho and Weeds, Sprague Grayden has become something of a cable television regular. This spring, however, she hits the big time with her role as first-daughter Olivia Taylor on 24. Despite her outright refusal to tell us how this season ends (apparently there’s a rule against that or something) Grayden did talk to us about the joys of playing a bad girl, her master plan for taking over Broadway, and what it feels like to have a website devoted entirely to scrutinizing everything you do.
I understand you made a point of getting a university degree before you embarked on your acting career.
SG: I did. I was an American studies major with a concentration in gender and American culture. It’s a mouthful. (laughs) Yeah, I went to Barnard. Do you know Barnard? It’s the all-girls school at Columbia University. It’s kind of like Radcliffe-Harvard, it’s one of the seven sisters.
Why did you choose an all-girls school?
SG: Actually, in the beginning I didn’t think that I would like it, but it ended up being a really amazing experience. A lot of times when you’re a tomboy when you’re a little girl you tend to only find support with guys and not bond with other girls as well. Once I went to school that really changed.
So you were a tomboy?
SG: Oh yeah, I was such a tomboy. I kind of didn’t look like a girl until later in my life, until I was about 16, so I just hung out with all the guys. It wasn’t even a sports thing, I didn’t really play sports, I just had a very boy-mentality I guess in some ways.
When did you grow out of that?
SG: I don’t think I’ve really grown out of it (laughs) I have a lot of guy friends, I always have. I have a lot of girl friends as well now, but among the girls, if I go out for a night on the town in LA with my friends, out dancing or something, they’ll remind me that I have to wear makeup. (laughs)
You graduated from college in 2001, and pretty shortly after that were landing serious TV acting roles. How did you make that happen so fast?
SG: I had acted when I was a kid, and I had an agent out of Boston, but then I became a teenager and got really awkward and gangly and weird lookin’, and I stopped working pretty much. But I did theatre in school and in college. I actually worked for an off-Broadway theatre company when I was in school, and when I was there I met a manager named David Guç. He found me after I graduated college somehow, and called me into his office and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was pounding pavement, making bad non-union movies and he said, “No, you’re going to work with me.” And I did, I worked with him for seven years, and he really started off my career, he was great.
