Austin Abrams plays frightened men who keep going, and he plays the fear before the courage. A decade of boyfriends and sidekicks taught him to be quick and small; Zach Cregger has now put him out in front, and he holds.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Austin Abrams's face in Resident Evil (2026) at the moment Bryan does something brave. Another actor would set the jaw. Abrams looks appalled, as if his body had gone ahead without asking him, and that is what makes it convincing. He is frightened from the first reel to the last and he goes forward anyway. That is the whole method, and it is a harder thing to act than courage.
He has been at it since childhood: acting lessons from five, theatre from nine, a screen debut in Ticking Clock (2011), then a long run of supporting parts. Gangster Squad (2013), The Kings of Summer (2013), the sidekick Ben in Paper Towns (2015), Ron Anderson in The Walking Dead (2015–2016). Euphoria (2019–2022) got him noticed as Ethan Lewis, and Chemical Hearts (2020) and Do Revenge (2022) gave him leads. For ten years he was the friend, the boyfriend, the boy at the edge of the frame, and he was good at it, which is partly why nobody looked up.
Zach Cregger did. In Weapons (2025) Abrams plays James, a thief who keeps ending up in the wrong houses, one chapter in a film told in chapters. It is not a large part and the structure works against him: by the time his turn came we knew the rhythm and were waiting for it. But he is quick and funny in it, alongside Josh Brolin, with whom he has now made two films, and he took the job for its director rather than its size. "I just wanted to do Weapons," he said afterwards. Cregger repaid him by making him the whole of Resident Evil: a medical courier, one parcel, one night, 90 minutes. Abrams carries it. He makes bad decisions at speed, he runs out of things, and when he finally does something heroic the audience we saw it with laughed and cheered on the same breath. So did we, and it caught us out; we had not expected to mind this much what happened to a man delivering a box.
What he cannot do we do not yet know, because he has not been asked. Both Cregger films run on panic, and Abrams is good at panic; Whalefall (2026), which puts him inside a whale and asks for a sustained physical performance, sounds like more of the same in a smaller room. His habit of playing the joke and the terror in the same moment is rare and useful in horror and may count for less elsewhere. Someone should give him a quiet part in a slow film, make him sit still, and see what is there. We suspect quite a lot. Until then, see him with Cregger, where fear is a virtue and he has plenty.
Biography
Austin Abrams is an American actor. He was born Austin Noah Abrams on 2 September 1996 in Sarasota, Florida.
Abrams made his feature film debut in Gangster Squad (2013) and has since appeared in films including The Kings of Summer (2013), Paper Towns (2015), Brad's Status (2017), Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019), Chemical Hearts (2020), Wolfs (2024) and Weapons (2025), in which he plays James. On television he has played Ron Anderson in The Walking Dead (2015–2016), Ethan Lewis in Euphoria (2019–2022) and Dash in Dash & Lily (2020).
In 2023 he won the Rising Star Award at the Sarasota Film Festival for his performance in The Line.
