Topher Grace

Topher Grace was an American TV and film actor who was best known for playing the affable Eric Forman for 7 seasons on the Fox sitcom "That 70's Show" (Fox, 1998-2006). Born in New York City and raised in Darien, Connecticut, Grace first started acting while attending boarding school in New Hampshire. He began appearing in school productions of famous musicals like "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," and quickly fell in love with acting. It was also during this period that Grace, whose first name is Christopher, started calling himself Topher, seeing as he hated it when people called him Chris. When he was just starting out as a stage actor, Grace met a young actress by the name of Chloe Sevigny (who would later go on to have a sterling acting career in her own right). Grace and Sevigny appeared in a few plays together, and although she was only a few years older than him, she eventually babysat for the younger Topher on a few occasions. By the time he was 18, Grace knew that he wanted to be in films and on TV. He enrolled in the University of Southern California, given its close proximity to Hollywood, and began going on auditions in between classes. On one of his very first auditions, he was asked to read for the part of a new sitcom that took place in the 1970s. Grace crushed the audition and was given the role of the lovable, but slightly socially awkward teenager Eric Forman on "That 70's Show." When the show premiered in 1998, it was a big hit, making instant stars of Grace and his fellow castmates, which included Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. By the early 2000s, with his career in the sitcom world riding high, Grace also started making a name for himself in movies. In the first few years of the 2000s, Grace racked up roles in "Traffic" (2000), "Ocean's Eleven" (2001), "Mona Lisa Smile" (2003) and "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!" (2004), thus proving he had the serious acting chops needed to make it in movies. In 2005, after 7 seasons on "That 70's Show," Grace left the series to focus on his burgeoning film career. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, he appeared as Venom in "Spider-Man 3" (2007), "Predators" (2010), "Take Me Home Tonight" (2011), "The Big Wedding" (2013), and "Interstellar" (2014). Then in 2018, Grace worked with the iconic director Spike Lee in "BlacKkKlansman" (2018). He played the white supremacist David Duke in the film, which took home an Academy Award and also starred Adam Driver. In 2019, nearly 15 years after he left "That 70's Show," Grace returned to TV with a starring role in the thriller mini-series "The Hot Zone" (National Geographic, 2019). That series, which also starred Julianna Margulies, premiered on the National Geographic channel in May of 2019.