(edit to add for the sake of being thorough: grace's other two "wall punching" moments in the movie are when he slams his spectrometer gun thing on the table then tosses it over his shoulder after it tells him the message canister is made of xenon, and when he slams his fist repeatedly into a computer monitor after discovering that the taumoeba can burrow through xenonite. the book scene i was referring to in the first post is when grace first discovers that taumoeba won't survive in the atmospheres of venus or threeworld, and rocky punches the wall of his xenonite bulb, and grace slams his fist into the table. i think this is enough to establish a pattern where grace's first instinct when frustrated or upset is to take it out on the nearest inanimate object, in a way that i personally would find quite alarming if i was sharing a workplace with someone who did this!)
when i rewatched the movie yesterday i noticed three separate occasions where grace slams his fist into something or throws a piece of furniture or equipment when he's frustrated or upset
which i think is a really interesting trait for a guy who is:
1. a molecular biologist (one of the occasions is him throwing what looks like a hazardous waste bin in the argon-flooded lab after discovering that the astrophage is water-based. it's a fairly lightweight object and he doesn't throw it that hard, but he's surrounded by breakable scientific equipment, and he is well aware that if he puts a hole in his PPE, he'll asphyxiate!)
2. a middle school teacher (a job where you're required to deal with frustration a little more constructively than flipping tables and punching walls. notably, grace generally does not swear when he's angry or hurt or surprised. even in his internal monologue in the books, even when he doesn't remember his own name, he's saying stuff like "gosh darn it all to heck" and then wondering why he does that.)
it's also interesting to consider this in light of the fact that grace got shitcanned from his entire first choice of career path, because he apparently could not restrain himself from being a dick about his pet theory. he rubbed people the wrong way so badly and consistently that he got blacklisted in academia. in the book, he butts heads with one of the other scientists on the project over the theory of panspermia, and stratt (of all people) has to step in to tell him to knock it off. again, this is really interesting to me, because mostly what we see of grace is that he's friendly, personable, clearly good at managing and working in a team when he puts his mind to it (we see less of this in the movie, but in the book he's doing a LOT of project management type stuff). his students like him, the original hail mary crew nominates him as the person they feel comfortable talking about their preferred method of dying with. and yet. he is capable of getting very belligerent when he thinks he's right. he insulted another scientist at a conference, and gives his papers deliberately inflammatory subheadings like "the goldilocks zone is for idiots". he punches walls! i know this is standard male movie protagonist behaviour, but most people don't do that! i like the interpretation of grace as someone who can be quite quick to anger if he doesn't rein it in, and who is excruciatingly aware of his own dickish tendencies, because they've massively derailed his life and ruined his career before. just like he thinks of himself as a coward, but clearly can be brave if he's given reason to be, he's someone who has to make an effort to be kind and patient and considerate. and he really is all those things, but it's on purpose. because he decided that was the kind of person he needed to be, just like he needed to train himself out of swearing. just like he's not an astronaut, he's not the guy for the job, but he had to be, so he did it.