Celebrity crush: Rachel Nichols (revised)

Here's a revised entry for an actress whom Ye Olde Podcaster admires, though he thinks her talent has rarely been seen because the roles she's often found weren't as demanding as she could manage. Longer entry than usual -- with more photos -- but that's the norm when working with the earliest entries in the celebrity crush series. As usual, Amazon and iTunes links follow. Any affiliate payments earned from your purchase or rental will help pay the hosting fees for my podcasts, so please consider clicking.

Name: Rachel Nichols (images -- some NSFW and some are almost guaranteed not to be her for reasons that will be explained below | Web site | Twitter)
Hometown: Augusta, Maine, according to her Wikipedia entry.
Best Known For: Her biggest screen credits include G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (playing Scarlett), the final season of Alias (playing CIA agent Rachel Gibson and doing action scenes in place of the pregnant Jennifer Garner), and a 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror (which also starred fellow celebrity crush Melissa George). She was also a green alien Starfleet Academy student in the Star Trek reboot directed by Alias creator JJ Abrams. This season has brought her to the drama Criminal Minds, and she'll be on the big screen in the upcoming Conan the Barbarian.

More substantive film work includes the films Debating Robert Lee (along with fellow celebrity crush Kaley Cuoco), Resurrecting the Champ and Charlie Wilson's War (as a congressional staffer, along with fellow celebrity crush Shiri Appleby) and the short-lived ABC crime drama Line of Fire (created by Rod Lurie and sadly not on DVD).
What She SHOULD Be Best Known For: Nichols played FBI Special Agent Rebecca Locke on the (again) short-lived Fox crime drama The Inside back in 2005 -- a character who, in shades of the Elizabeth Smart case, had been kidnapped as a teenager and thus had special insights into the minds of human predators.

Fox mishandled the series, as they've so often done with genre television, and not every episode made it to screen -- and the ones that did were often aired out of the intended sequence. It's never made it to DVD, and that's a damn shame. Nichols was fantastic in it, as were Peter Coyote and Adam Baldwin, and producer Tim Minear did some of his smartest writing on there.

Not bad for a show that had started out as a revival of 21 Jump Street before taking a Silence of the Lambs direction and ditching the high-school setting. But, again, it's not on DVD, so you'll have to take my word for it unless you can find it online somewhere. ... Since I wrote this profile initially, she has, as stated above, joined fellow celebrity crush Paget Brewster on Criminal Minds -- playing a character whose father was a serial killer. I cannot imagine that making her character so intimately tied to the crimes she and her peers investigate is a coincidence; the producers must have had Nichols' performance on The Inside in mind when they picked her to replace fellow crush A.J. Cook.

If it's truly not easy being green, I'm willing to comfort her.

Humble Beginnings: In addition to modeling work early in her career, she also appeared in the epic fail of a prequel that was Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd as a love interest for one of the title morons.

Obligatory Edgy Stuff: Some of that pre-fame modeling showed a lot of skin, hence the NSFW warning on the image search above. She's moved away from it since then -- demanding some changes to the script of P2, in fact -- but such images doubtless haunt many an actress as her career gets rolling. In fact, the photo at top was shamelessly used as a logo for some sexist pig's podcast once.
Not Just a Pretty Face or Awesome Body: She graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a double major in math and economics. She also studied drama and psychology while there.
Mistaken Identities: There's also a not-unattractive ESPN anchor named Rachel Nichols. So looking this one up on Google can generate even more false hits than one usually encounters. But at least they're aesthetically pleasing false hits.

... Sweet Buddha on a bicycle.

Why Ye Olde Podcaster Likes Her: In addition to being gorgeous, she's a better actress than many of her action film roles have allowed her to show. Her work on The Inside was as revelatory as Sarah Michelle Gellar at her best on Buffy -- a strikingly pretty woman who was more than the equal for any man in terms of grit, determination and strength.
TV series credits: Criminal Minds, season 6 (Amazon | iTunes) * Alias, season 5 (Amazon | iTunes) * The Inside (Amazon | iTunes) * Line of Fire (Amazon | iTunes) * Sex and the City, season 4: "A 'Vogue' Idea" (Amazon | iTunes)

Guess she got cold doing the other pics. Can't blame her.

Film and TV-movie credits: The Loop (Amazon | iTunes) * Conan the Barbarian (2011) (Amazon | iTunes) * Ollie Klublershturf vs. the Nazis (Amazon | iTunes) * Meskada (Amazon | iTunes) * For Sale by Owner (Amazon | iTunes) * U.S. Attorney (Amazon | iTunes) * G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Amazon | iTunes) * Star Trek (Amazon | iTunes) * The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (Amazon | iTunes) * Charlie Wilson's War (Amazon | iTunes) * P2 (Amazon | iTunes) * Resurrecting the Champ (Amazon | iTunes) * Them (Amazon | iTunes) * The Woods (Amazon | iTunes) * Shopgirl (Amazon | iTunes) * Mr. Dramatic (Amazon | iTunes) * The Amityville Horror (2005) (Amazon | iTunes) * Walk into a Bar (Amazon | iTunes) * A Funny Thing Happened at the Quick Mart (Amazon | iTunes) * Debating Robert Lee (Amazon | iTunes) * Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (Amazon | iTunes) * Autumn in New York (Amazon | iTunes)