Booboo Stewart

In Descendants (2015), Jay cannot walk past a table without pocketing something on it. Kenny Ortega's film repeats the joke a good many times and it keeps working, because Stewart's hands do the stealing while his face carries on with the conversation. It is a small skill, and it tells you what kind of actor he has been so far: one who can keep a running gag alive at the edge of a scene while the leads sing in the middle of it.

That has been the shape of the career. He was a martial artist and a stunt performer before he was an actor, and the parts that made his name wanted a body that could do things and a face that would not pull focus from the stars. Seth Clearwater in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) and the two Breaking Dawn films is one of the pack. Warpath in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) is a man with knives in a crowd of mutants. Jay ran through three Descendants films with Ortega, in 2015, 2017 and 2019, and the fencing and the choreography are where Stewart looks most at home. White Frog (2012), an independent drama in which he played the lead, is the exception, and it is the title on his list we would most like to have reviewed.

Let Him Go (2020) is the film where somebody finally asked for more. Thomas Bezucha casts him as Peter Dragswolf, a young man living alone on the plains who takes in Diane Lane and Kevin Costner's couple, and gives him one speech about where he came from and what was taken from him there. Stewart does not lean on it, and it moved us more than the thriller around it had any right to expect. Then the film puts him behind a wheel. He is used mostly to drive for the rest of it, and we have rarely seen a film open a door for an actor and shut it so promptly. Stewart has said of the part: "I really loved that character and the opportunity to give people who’ve actually been through what Peter’s been through a voice." He gave it for about three minutes, and it was the film, not him, that ran out of things to say.

Since then there has been television, Julie and the Phantoms (2020) and Good Trouble (2022 to 2024), and independent work such as Those Who Walk Away (2022). He has said he wants to direct, and that he has been writing. On the evidence of that one speech, someone should first put him in a room, give him a scene that is neither a fight nor a getaway, and stay on him. The parts he has been offered ask him to be dependable. The one time a film asked for something else, he had it ready.