Rachel Emily Nichols was born on January 8, 1980. She is an American actress, currently known for her film work and for her portrayal of CIA agent Rachel Gibson on the ABC television series Alias.
Nichols was born and raised in Augusta, Maine, where she attended Cony High School. As a sophomore at Cony, she studied abroad in France, an experience that would, in hindsight, prepare her well for her future career. Surprisingly, given her current status as a top model and actress, Nichols admitted to Latino Review that she "wasn't the hot chick" in high school, referring to herself as a "late bloomer." Upon graduation, she headed to Columbia University in New York, intent on studying psychology.
It was at Columbia where the events fell into place that determined Nichols' current career path. 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," she would later say. It wasn't very long before she was posing for companies like Guess? and Abercrombie & Fitch, while also enrolling in drama classes at Columbia, never knowing when she might need them. She maintained a difficult schedule throughout college, balancing her studies in New York City with photo shoots in Europe. On top of all that, Nichols decided in 2002 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.
Dumberer was a theater flop, but Nichols turned heads with both her beauty (a known commodity at that point) and her acting skills, which were a surprise to all involved. If the Jessica role seemed natural to Nichols, it was because she herself had been an editor with the school newspaper back in Augusta. After her appearance in Dumberer, Hollywood began to seriously notice Nichols, as she has since earned roles in the television series Line of Fire, plus the 2005 horror movies The Amityville Horror and The Woods.
In 2004, FOX planned to develop a show vaguely reminiscent of their first hit drama, 21 Jump Street. They enlisted Todd & 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 purging the entire cast, save for Nichols. 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 Silence of the Lambs than Jump Street, and Nichols' character had dramatically changed 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 most dangerous of serial offenders. Another new wrinkle was that Nichols' 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 Insideˈs 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 plays Rachel Gibson, a computer expert duped into thinking she works for the CIA, when in fact she is working for a dangerous terrorist organization. Discovering the truth, Nichols' character later joins the real CIA and becomes Sydney Bristow's protégé, complete with undercover missions and martial arts scenes -- which Nichols had to work hard to make realistic, struggling at first with the stunts. Coincidentally, Alias marks the second series in a row in which Nichols portrays a government agent.
Although ABC announced the cancellation of Alias effective in May 2006, Nichols' 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). Alias returned to ABC on April 19, 2006, after a four-month hiatus.
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