Katie McGrath

The costume mishap that launched a career

Katie McGrath wasn't looking for fame when she stepped onto the set of The Tudors in 2007. Her job was to organize clothing racks and fit corsets as a wardrobe assistant. She had studied History at Trinity College Dublin, and her career goal was fashion journalism. But the show's production team picked up a magnetism that didn't fit behind the cameras.

She was advised to send photos to local casting directors.

In 2008, she landed the role of Morgana Pendragon in the BBC series Merlin. It was a risky bet, since McGrath had no dramatic training and her previous experience was limited to a couple of commercials. The series became a global phenomenon and ran for five seasons. British viewership topped six million on average during the broadcast of the final batch of episodes in 2012.

And the leap into the void worked out.

She learned the craft on the fly during the filming of this fantasy series. But the character's success didn't stop the industry from trying to typecast her as period-piece ladies. After the production wrapped in 2012, she sought projects that broke away from the medieval aesthetic of her early career.

Breaking into the big franchises

In 2013 she moved to Budapest to shoot the NBC series Dracula. She played Lucy Westenra and worked alongside Jonathan Rhys Meyers once again. The series was canceled after ten episodes due to weak ratings in the United States. This commercial setback pushed her to look for opportunities in big-budget film.

In 2015, she appeared in Jurassic World under the direction of Colin Trevorrow. Her character suffered one of the most talked-about deaths in the franchise for its technical brutality. It was the first time the franchise showed a woman dying violently at the hands of several dinosaurs in a single sequence. The film grossed $1,600 million at the worldwide box office.

A year later she joined the DC Comics universe.

In 2016 she joined the cast of Supergirl to bring Lena Luthor to life. What started as a supporting collaboration for three episodes became a five-year contract. The writers took advantage of her ability to handle technical dialogue loaded with moral ambiguity. The actress, however, always kept a careful distance from the fan phenomenon surrounding the series.

Keeping a low profile as a career strategy

McGrath belongs to a generation of actors who shun digital exposure. She has no official profiles on Instagram or Twitter and avoids interviews that aren't tied to a specific promotion. In 2017, she worked under Guy Ritchie in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. The film was a financial disaster for Warner Bros, with estimated losses of $150 million.

Despite the financial slump, her name stayed on the radar of casting directors for genre projects. In 2023 she played the Adjudicator in The Continental, the miniseries that expands the universe of John Wick. For this production, shot in Hungary, she had to perform behind a porcelain mask that covered half her face. The costume design was a direct request from the actress to heighten the character's coldness.

She lives in London and manages her contracts through agencies that protect her privacy with strict confidentiality clauses. Her per-episode pay on major American networks has exceeded 50,000 dollars over the past decade. Filming her scenes in Budapest for the assassin saga took exactly three weeks of shooting schedule.