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Nichols was born and raised in
Augusta, Maine, where she attended Cony High School. 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 graduation, she headed to Columbia University in
New York, intent on studying psychology. While growing up, Nichols enjoyed
trekking through the outdoors and being on the water 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 a flop, Nichols 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 series 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 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' 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' 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' first season. Discovering
the truth, Nichols' 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 to make 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' 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 is now turning her attention back to the big screen, with
two movies set to come out in 2007. The first, Resurrecting the Champ,
stars Josh Hartnett as a sportswriter who finds a former boxing legend
(Samuel L. Jackson) living homeless on the streets. The second, P2, marks
a return to the horror genre for Nichols, as she portrays a businesswoman
who gets trapped inside a public parking garage with a deranged security
guard. In this role, Nichols stood firm by her ethics and refused to shoot
any type of nudity, including sheer, wet, tops. "In place of the nipples
there's clearly a lot of cleavage," Nichols mused, "so we made a
compromise."
Nichols also recently landed one of the leads in another FOX series -- the
2007 sci-fi drama Them, directed by Jonathan Mostow.
On November 9, 2007, JJ Abrams confirmed that Nichols would be cast in his
new Star Trek movie in the role of Yeoman Janice Rand. |
