Though she can joke about it now, years later, it was a painful time for Grace — and not because strangers on the internet didn’t understand what she was going through. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says of the surgery and recovery, before noting that “it was so worth it in the long run.” She couldn’t walk for a month, and when she could move again, she had to relearn how to do it.
“It’s very shocking and visceral to not be able to do that anymore,” Grace recalls, “and to be so, all of a sudden, reliant on other people. Like not even being able to get up and go to the bathroom by yourself. It was such a weird thing to relearn how to walk, and to get back into functioning as a person.”
Grace adds, “Truly, I’m so grateful I did it, but at the time, I remember in my recovery, I just spent hours sobbing on the couch like, ‘I’m never going to be better. I’m going to be like this forever. And my back, I’m just going to be in pain forever.’”
The surgery came after one of her bigger career disappointments, when the Olivia Wilde-directed gymnastics biopic Perfect, in which Grace was set to co-star, was indefinitely postponed just before they were supposed to begin filming. She had already trained for eight months at that point, working out almost every single day. That brought its own stresses. With her back pain and spinal curve, she says, she wasn’t seeing the results she wanted.
“It was so confusing and upsetting for me, because I was like, ‘I’m working so hard. Why is this not working as well as it should?’” Grace explains. “It was such a mental mind screw, because I just couldn’t figure it out. Now, looking back, I’m like, ‘Well, it’s because literally your hip was over here.”
