Heather Graham: 5 Essential Roles (and 5 Deep Cuts) to Get to Know The White Lotus Star
I’m gonna call it: if Season 4 of The White Lotus airs (as planned) before May 31 next year, Heather Graham will receive a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 2028 Emmy awards.
For three seasons now, Mike White’s murder-in-paradise series has been dominating that awards show, and not least in that category, where its staggering 14 nominations have offered as clear a sign as any of White’s remarkable skill at writing female characters.
Whether you’re a movie fan who got to know Graham during her incredible run of work in the ‘90s — a decade in which she collaborated with some of the coolest filmmakers around— or are more familiar with her equally successful period as a lead in mainstream comedies, this announcement should come as welcome news. It might be a good time to refresh your memory on her best roles, or — even better — to experience them for the first time.
In the list below, you’ll find five of her most famous roles and five slightly deeper cuts that you might not have seen yet, which I’ve listed in alternating order. Read on to discover more about each one and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
Roller Girl
After his Best Picture win for One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson is currently the toast of Hollywood, but he was still just a fresh-faced 26-year-old when he made his first masterpiece, Boogie Nights, in 1997 — a ‘70s-set portrait of the porn industry in the San Fernando Valley in which Graham, as the starlet Rollergirl, played her most pivotal role.
The film stars Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler, a famously well-endowed adult actor whose sharp rise in the industry eventually gives way to an even sharper fall. Graham is just one amongst the film’s incredible ensemble cast, but the warmth of her performance (especially in her scenes with Julianne Moore) becomes an essential part of the film’s melancholy and quite moving core. It’s still her defining role.
Annie Blackburn
Five years before Anderson came along, Graham was cast by David Lynch to play Annie Blackburn, a love interest for Special Agent Dale Cooper and a new member of the Double R team, in the second season of Twin Peaks. As Blackburn, Graham only appears in a few of the season’s 22 episodes, but she made enough of an impression that Lynch brought her back for his 1992 prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
If you’ve never seen the show, it’s a series that boasts the very best of Lynch’s unique abilities as a filmmaker: both the funny, “aw shucks” Americana of movies like The Straight Story and the terrifying, subconscious flourishes of films like Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet.
Felicity Shagwell
It might have come before the turn of the Millennium, but Graham’s most famous performance is probably still her turn as Felicity Shagwell in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me — the insanely successful second outing of Mike Myers’ hilariously horny (and James Bond spoofing) secret agent.
In the first film, International Man of Mystery, Austin is a swinging ‘60s icon who gets frozen in ice, ala Steve Rogers, and wakes up in the present day. For the sequel, Meyers flipped the script, taking the newly acclimatised Austin back to ‘60s London, where he soon meets and falls in love with Graham’s ridiculously named CIA agent. Graham, as per usual, is delightful in a role that solidified her place as an A-list star.
Nadine
One of Graham’s earliest roles came in indie legend Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy, in which she played Nadine, the youngest member of a group of addicts who take to robbing drug stores to bankroll their afflictions.
The film is led by Matt Dillon in what turned out to be a breakout role for the future There’s Something About Mary star, but Graham steals some early scenes in what turns out to be a brief role. If you’ve yet to see it and you’re a fan of anything Van Sant directed in that era, like My Own Private Idaho, it’s well worth seeking out.
Mary Kelly
With lead roles in films like Committed and Say It Isn’t So, Graham’s star power was probably at its brightest in the years after Austin Powers. Looking back, her most prominent role during that time was probably her supporting turn opposite Johnny Depp in the Hughes brothers’ big-budget adaptation of From Hell, a graphic novel about Jack the Ripper originally co-written by the great Alan Moore.
If you know anything about Moore adaptations (think V for Vendetta, Watchmen), it’s probably that Moore tends to disown them for not quite living up to the thematic depth of his writing, and From Hell doesn’t buck that trend. It is, however, a stylish-looking movie and Graham’s performance as Mary Kelly, a sex worker who becomes the love interest of Depp’s inspector, is easily one of the best things about it.
Lorraine
It’s a bit of a shame that Graham’s role in Swingers, as a fun and bubbly woman whose purpose in the movie is to help Jon Favreau's Mike get over his ex, kind of became the thing she would later be typecast as after her all-star run in the early ‘00s — but she still brings all kinds of good energy to that slightly dated movie.
Indeed, Swingers might have been written by Favreau (the future MCU-Midas), directed by Doug Liman (who went on to make Edge of Tomorrow), and featured a peak Vince Vaughan, but you’d be hard pressed to say that it’s aged particularly well. If you’re willing to forgive some of its more 1996-coded aspects, however, it’s still a pretty fun watch.
Dr Molly Clock
It’s a bit of a shame that Graham’s role in Swingers, as a fun and bubbly woman whose purpose in the movie is to help Jon Favreau's Mike get over his ex, kind of became the thing she would later be typecast as after her all-star run in the early ‘00s — but she still brings all kinds of good energy to that slightly dated movie.
Indeed, Swingers might have been written by Favreau (the future MCU-Midas), directed by Doug Liman (who went on to make Edge of Tomorrow), and featured a peak Vince Vaughan, but you’d be hard pressed to say that it’s aged particularly well. If you’re willing to forgive some of its more 1996-coded aspects, however, it’s still a pretty fun watch.
Daisy
Austin Powers 2 is much better known these days, but at the beginning of 1999, the release of Bowfinger felt like a huge deal. This is a movie that brought together Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, two of the most heavyweight comedy stars of the decade, under the accomplished direction of Frank Oz — but looking back on it now, it feels like a film that time forgot.
The story is a movie industry satire that follows Martin’s eponymous B-movie producer as he attempts to make a movie by cutting every corner imaginable and breaking every rule in the book — including hiring the somewhat dim-witted twin brother of one of the world's biggest action stars (both are, of course, played by Murphy). For her part, Graham plays Daisy, the female lead of the film within the film, with characteristic charm. After writing this, I kind of feel like watching it again now.
Jade
Graham’s part in The Hangover was pretty typical of the kind of roles she was starting to get by that point in her career, but as Jade — a stripper who Ed Helms’ dentist marries at some point in the Wolf Pack’s drunken, Las Vegas, bachelor-bacchanal — the actress provides a steadying presence in what is an otherwise relentlessly anarchic film.
It’s kind of amazing to think about, given our current drought of big-screen comedies, but The Hangover made half a billion at the global box office on its original release while making bona fide stars out of its three lead actors. For Graham, however — aside from reprising her role in Part III — it kind of turned out to be the actress’s last high-profile movie role. Here’s hoping The White Lotus changes that for the better.
Annie
Granted, it’s icky to consider, but if you were a beautiful young actress in the ‘90s or ‘00s, there was a pretty good chance that Woody Allen was going to write you a role. Graham, for whatever reason, had to settle for a knockoff version in Edward Burns’ Sidewalks of New York, a film with a very Allen-esque title and filled with a similar web of interconnected Manhattanite stories.
Burns (who also wrote and directed the film) star as a disappointed writer alongside Rosario Dawson’s school teacher, Brittany Murphy’s NYU student, David Krumholtz’s songwriter, Stanley Tucci’ dentist and Graham’s real estate broker, who is also the increasingly disinterested wife of Tucci’s character, and so becomes the love interest of Burns’ writer — thus tying the story’s internal note.
