Rachel Nichols

Rachel Nichols (born January 8, 1980) is an American model turned actress, best known for her portrayal of CIA officer Rachel Gibson on the ABC television series Alias. She's also starred in several films, including Dumb & Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd, The Amityville Horror, The Woods, and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

The daughter of Jim and Alison Nichols, Nichols was born and raised in Augusta, Kennebec County, Maine. She attended Cony High School, where she competed in the high jump. 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 graduating in 1998, she headed to Columbia University in New York City, intent on studying psychology. While growing up, Nichols enjoyed trekking through the outdoors 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, Rachel 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 ultimately a flop, the exposure it provided earned Nichols roles in the television series Line of Fire, plus the 2005 horror films, The Amityville Horror, and The Woods.

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 turned her attention back to the big screen with two movies in 2007. The first, Resurrecting the Champ, featured Nichols as the assistant to a sportswriter (Josh Hartnett) who finds a former boxing legend (Samuel L. Jackson) living homeless on the streets. The second, P2, marked a return to the horror genre for Nichols, as she portrayed a businesswoman who gets trapped inside a public parking garage with a deranged security guard. In this role, Nichols refused to shoot any type of nudity, including sheer, wet tops. "In place of the nipples there's clearly a lot of cleavage," Nichols said in an interview, "so we made a compromise."

In 2007, Rachel Nichols also landed one of the leads in another FOX series: the science fiction drama Them, directed by Jonathan Mostow, although the show ultimately was not picked up by the network. In 2009, Nichols appeared in J. J. Abrams's Star Trek in which she plays an Orion cadet at Starfleet Academy, and will star in Stephen Sommers' G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, in which she portrays Shana "Scarlett" O'Hara.