Abby Ryder Fortson

The best thing Abby Ryder Fortson has done so far happens in a department store mirror. Margaret has just been fitted for her first bra, with her mother and a saleswoman who has seen it all, and the scene is the funniest in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (2023). Then the camera finds Fortson's face, wanting this and dreading it at once, and the laugh goes back where it came from. She does not play to us. She plays a girl who has just noticed that everyone else seems to know the rules.

She had been working for most of her life by then. She started on television at about five, with Transparent (2014), The Whispers (2015) and the Duplass brothers' Togetherness (2015–16), where she was a regular in the second series. The film part that put her in front of a large audience was Cassie Lang, Paul Rudd's daughter in Ant-Man (2015) and Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), both for Peyton Reed. Our review of the first barely paused on her, and that was the film's fault more than hers: she and Judy Greer give Scott a reason and are then put away. There was a supporting turn in A Dog's Journey (2019). Then Kelly Fremon Craig gave her Judy Blume's Margaret, and a lead.

What she does in Margaret is watch. Fortson plays a girl who is studying everyone else for clues and is sure she is the only one without them, and she never asks to be found adorable, which is rarer in child actors than it should be. The club scenes with Elle Graham, Amari Alexis Price and Katherine Mallen Kupferer work because of her; she is the one listening. Her scenes with Rachel McAdams are better still. There is one in the second half, which we will not describe, in which mother and daughter stop pretending for a minute and nobody underlines it, and it moved us more than a gentle comedy about training bras had any right to. She has said of the part that "I went through the book a million times, went through the script a million times", and the work shows; nothing in the performance looks like a child being told where to stand.

That is one lead, and one is not a record. The Marvel films used her as a function, and when the character needed to grow up the part went to an older actress, which is the usual hazard of being a child in a franchise. Since Margaret she has turned up in The Pitt (2025) and in voice work, and nothing we have seen tells us yet what she will be at twenty-five. The film to watch is the one Fremon Craig made. See it for McAdams, who gets the better story, and stay for the girl in the mirror, who makes sure the grown-ups do not get all of it.