Dylan Minnette

Watch Wes Hicks in Scream (2022) walk through his own kitchen. The sequence is built from open doors and a running shower, and Minnette moves through it without hurrying, without looking behind him, as a boy who has grown up on these films and still cannot quite believe they apply to him. We spent it wanting him to turn round. It is the best-staged stretch of that film, and it works because he does not act frightened for us; he lets the doors do it.

That reserve is the whole of his manner, and it has been there from the start. He was a child actor from 2005, with guest spots on Drake & Josh and Prison Break, where he played the young Michael Scofield, and a main role on Saving Grace from 2007 to 2010. The films began with Prisoners (2013), in which he is Ralph Dover, one of the older children in Denis Villeneuve's ensemble. Our review, which had its hands full with Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, did not find room for him. That is the lot of a supporting teenager in a Villeneuve thriller, and no disgrace.

Then came the leads: Goosebumps (2015), a family horror-comedy, and Don't Breathe (2016) for Fede Álvarez, which critics liked. Both cast him as the young man in the intense situation, and horror has kept doing so since. In between, 13 Reasons Why (2017–2020) gave him Clay Jensen across four seasons, the part most people know him for, and the one where the introspective, strained teenager became his signature. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length. What critics consistently noticed is telling enough: that he was so committed to Clay's low mood that the few lighter, flirtatious scenes came as a relief.

There is the strength and the problem in one observation. Reserve is a gift in horror, where the audience supplies the feeling and the actor's job is not to get in the way, and Minnette never gets in the way. Over four seasons of a drama, though, the same withheld face begins to look less like a choice than a limit. The risk with a reserved actor is that the reserve becomes the performance. Nobody has yet cast him against it, and until somebody does we cannot say whether there is more.

Since 2022, when he also appeared in The Dropout, he has spent most of his time as singer and rhythm guitarist in Wallows, with Braeden Lemasters and Cole Preston. Asked about it, he has said: "I think there was a weird narrative that's gone around that I quit acting, but I never felt that or said that." We take him at his word. Horror will keep a kitchen light on for him; we would rather see him somewhere with no doors to walk through.