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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.
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.
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
Fastlane's 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 Nichols wasn't already living in this show when I got there I'd
have cast her. She's 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 Inside's 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 Alias's 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. Coincidentally, Alias marked the
second series in a row for Nichols in which she portrayed a government
agent.
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."
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.
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. |
