Chase W. Dillon

A small Black boy in a suit and bowler hat sits beside a slave catcher and keeps his accounts. He does not fidget, he does not plead, and he does not look to the adults for permission. That is Homer in Barry Jenkins's The Underground Railroad (2021), and Chase W. Dillon was nine when he was cast, after an audition where he delivered the lines from memory. Most children on screen are asked to be adorable or frightened. Dillon was asked to be neither, and he managed it for ten hours beside Joel Edgerton, who talks constantly, by saying almost nothing.

We found Homer harder to look at than anything else in the series, and it took us a while to work out why. Cora's suffering asks for our sympathy and gets it. Homer asks for nothing. Dillon gives him the calm of a child who made his arrangements early, and the calm is what frightens: a boy who has decided how the world works and is not waiting to be told otherwise. He does very little, and he never breaks. Dillon himself said of the script, "When I read the script, I felt it was me," which is either a nine-year-old's confidence or a very good actor's, and on the evidence it was both.

He had started two years earlier, as Ollie in First Wives Club (2019), and the work since has come in the shape you would expect for a boy who can be still: Young Iwegbuna in Little America (2020), Young Nat in The Harder They Fall (2021), Cabbage in The Book of Clarence (2024), Micah Bynum in Watson (2025), and a voice, Hawthorn, in the animated Pinecone & Pony (2022–2023). Directors keep casting him as the younger version of someone, or as the small serious presence in a period piece. It is not a bad habit for them to have.

Haunted Mansion (2023) is the other thing we have seen him do, and the film is not much: a handsome house and a script that explains itself every ten minutes. Dillon, as Travis, is the only performer besides LaKeith Stanfield who is allowed to be sad without a punchline following. Around him Owen Wilson larks, Tiffany Haddish shouts and Danny DeVito gets frightened, and the boy in the middle of it plays a grieving child straight. He keeps pace with the comedians without trying to be one, and the film's one decent idea, about grief, survives largely because he takes it seriously.

So far he has been solemn opposite Edgerton and sad opposite Stanfield. Nobody has yet asked him to be loud, or funny on purpose, or to carry a film from the first frame to the last, and he is at the age where the parts for boys stop coming and the parts for young men have not started. The dossier notes he has begun writing and directing his own projects. If the industry is slow to find him something to grow into, he appears to be preparing to write it himself.