Grace Gummer Honored To Join ‘Mr. Robot’ Family

Part of joining the cast of the acclaimed cyber thriller “Mr. Robot” for Grace Gummer is pretending she knows about technology.

“I feel like we all should know how to do all that stuff, but I definitely don’t,” says Gummer, 30, belying her status as millennial. “Don’t know how to write code or can barely sync my iPhone.”

Nonetheless, she’s joined the cast of “Mr. Robot” as a regular on the USA Network series, playing tough FBI investigator Dominique “Dom” DiPierro.

And if she has cyber questions, “we have a lot of tech people on set who help us with hacker lingo and all kinds of questions like that.”

Gummer, who grew up in Salisbury as the middle daughter of acting legend Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer, is one of a number of women who are now part of USA Network’s “Mr. Robot.”

So much so that she appeared alongside Carly Chaikin, Portia Doubleday and Stephanie Corneliussen on a panel called “The Women of ‘Mr. Robot'” at the TV Critics Association’s summer press tour.

In a show led by the Emmy-nominated Rami Malek and Christian Slater, “I think we all have our own purpose and our own drive, and we’re not secondary characters,” Gummer says of the female cast. “We drive the story just as much as Rami and Christian and now also the new characters on the show do.”

Examining her character Dom DiPierro, Gummer says, “she’s someone that uses her badge and her gun and her job as her mask. I think she focuses on her work as her life in order to maybe distract herself from herself or finding the meaning that she’s looking for and finding happiness.

“But I think,” she adds, “as you’ll see as the season goes on, she’s obviously very multifaceted and complex and somewhat strange. And I feel like I surprise myself every day with this character. I didn’t know what to expect, and I think that’s how the audience will feel and will be very surprised.”

Gummer wasn’t familiar with “Mr. Robot” when she came in for her audition.

“To be completely honest, I just went in there blindly, without any sort of plan, really, except what I wanted to do for this character and what sort of weird edge I wanted to give her,” she says.

So she went home and watched the first season. “I binge watched it,” she says.

“It’s rare that as an actor, especially as a woman, that you get to work on such a show, that you actually would want to watch and love,” Gummer says. “And to me, the show is important and this character is very special. I just felt so honored to be able to join the ‘Robot’ family.”

Despite its dark tone, “we have such a good time on set,” she says.

Gummer praises show creator Sam Esmail, who writes, directs and edits every episode.

“He cares so much,” she says.

“He definitely has a very specific idea, but he also, I think we can probably all say, really trusts our instincts and what we want to bring. So it’s a full on collaborative exchange.

“I had some eccentric little things I wanted to add to my character that I had ideas about, and I told him about them and he put them in, so he was very open and excited about it.”

Olympic Swimmer?

Despite growing up in a family of American acting royalty — daughter of a woman who has more Oscar nominations than any other actor in history, winning three — she didn’t give much attention to acting when growing up in Connecticut.

“No, I mostly was involved in sports and baby sitting and summer jobs,” she says in an interview after the panel discussion. “I was a big athlete. I always thought I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer.”

She gave up that notion, she says, at college, “when I was introduced to the world.”

“I was involved in a small collective ensemble, a black box theater group,” Gummer says. “I went to Vassar and majored in art history and Italian, but I felt like I spent most of my time doing theater. So that when I graduated I wanted to do something else. “

And so she did, shifting to costume design.

“I wanted to marry theater and fashion together and I spoke Italian, so I moved to Rome and lived there for a while and worked at a costume house,” she says.

It wasn’t quite what she expected. “I found myself among all these old ladies sewing hats and old capes and I was like, ‘I think I maybe need to go home.'”

Once back, “a friend gave me a script for a play and said, ‘Would you design the costumes for it?’ and this was a year out of college,” Gummer says. “And I read it and the first thing I thought was: ‘I want to be in this. I want to say these things.’ So that sort of ignited the spark again.”

She got early encouragement, receiving a Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut in a 2011 revival of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” She appeared in films from “Frances Ha” to HBO’s “Confirmation” and was seen on TV in all 21 episodes of “Extant” and is set to appear in Amazon Prime’s series “Good Girls Revolt,” playing a young Nora Ephron.

Gummer says she prefers to play “complex, 3-D women who have a lot on their plate trying to balance professional lives and personal lives.”

That said, she adds, “I’d love to play anything that comes my way. I’m not a picky person but I do want to do work that means something and says something important. But I know that I might not always have that choice but if that chance comes along, I’ll take it. And if not, I’ll try to make it into something interesting.”

At the same time, working in what some might say is the shadow of her mother is not something she worries about.

“I think that I’ve worked really hard to pave my own path for myself and to make my own name,” Gummer says. “I’m just lucky to have a loving, supportive family that supports me whatever I choose to do.”

“MR. ROBOT” runs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on the USA Network.