Alisha Weir makes cleverness sympathetic in Matilda and brings a dancer's control to Abigail. She is an assured lead in both, though we rate her most when the surrounding film knows when to quieten down.
Fi1m perspective
In Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022), the adults are making a terrible noise, and Alisha Weir does not compete. Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough give her Matilda Wormwood plenty of bad behaviour to react to as her parents. Weir makes the girl's cleverness appealing because she lets us see how little protection it offers against being bullied. She can be certain she is right and still be hurt. It is an assured lead performance, with none of the smugness that could make this child hard to spend an evening with.
Matthew Warchus gets the best out of her by allowing quieter scenes with Lashana Lynch's Miss Honey to matter as much as the noisy confrontations. We were moved by their companionship because being taken seriously by an adult comes as such a relief for this child. The staging sometimes needs to give the children more space. Weir and Lynch already make kindness worth watching; there is no need to keep the production busy around them.
The smaller role of Nancy Gooding, the daughter who adores Jessie Buckley's Rose in Wicked Little Letters (2024), gives us less to judge. The more revealing move is to Radio Silence's Abigail (2024), where Weir's physical discipline becomes a means of frightening us. She trained in ballet and performed stunts for the title role. The frightened child's polite request to go home gets as much care as the physical performance.
In Abigail, she and Dan Stevens keep the film entertaining while its explanations of the rules threaten to take over. It is twenty minutes too long, and the ballet becomes less surprising with repetition. Those reservations do not make her performance any less assured, but they do make Warchus's trust in her quieter acting look valuable. We would welcome more parts that allow the vulnerability she brings to Matilda as well as the defiance. Start there, especially with the scenes opposite Miss Honey.
Biography
Alisha Weir is an Irish actress. Born on 26 September 2009 in Dublin, she began her career in theatre, appearing in the musical Once at Dublin's Olympia Theatre in 2017 and performing on Ireland's The Late Late Toy Show.
Her film debut came in 2018 with Don't Leave Home. She gained wider recognition as Matilda Wormwood in Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022), for which she won the Dublin Film Critics' Circle Breakthrough Artist award. She played Nancy Gooding in Wicked Little Letters (2023) and the title role in the horror film Abigail (2024), for which she trained in ballet and performed her own stunts. She has received nominations including for the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer.
