Scanlen plays girls who are two things at once, the child at the dinner table and the person behind her eyes, and she makes the switch look like a habit. In Sharp Objects and Little Women she does it beside much bigger names and is not overshadowed.
Fi1m perspective
In Sharp Objects (2018) Amma Crellin roller-skates through Wind Gap in shorts and then comes to dinner in a pinafore, and the point of Eliza Scanlen's performance is that neither outfit is the disguise. Amma is Camille's teenage half-sister, the daughter still in the house, and the house belongs to Patricia Clarkson's Adora, who runs it at a whisper. Scanlen has to be loud enough to register in that room and quiet enough to belong to it, and she manages both without ever seeming to try. It is the series' third performance, behind Amy Adams and Clarkson, and it is the one that tells you a career is starting.
It started, as Australian careers often do, in a soap: a recurring part as Tabitha Ford in Home and Away (2016) while she was still at school. Sharp Objects brought her the international attention two years later, and the films came quickly after it. She had already shot Babyteeth (2020), a lead for which she shaved her head, before Greta Gerwig cast her as Beth March in Little Women (2019). Since then the work has been supporting parts in The Devil All the Time (2020), Old (2021), The Starling Girl (2023) and Caddo Lake (2024), television in The First Lady (2022), Mayfair Witches (2023) and Dope Girls (2025), and a stage debut in Lord of the Flies (2019).
Beth is the part we would send a stranger to. Gerwig cuts the novel into two timelines and shows us the adult Beth unwell at home before she shows us the child, so Scanlen is playing a girl who does not know what the audience knows. That is hard to do without pleading, and she never pleads. Her scene at the piano with Chris Cooper's Mr Laurence moved us more than a scene about a piano has any right to, and it is her stillness that does it: she receives the kindness as though she has been caught out by it. We said at the time we would not change a frame, and we would not.
The reservation is about the parts, not the acting. She has been cast again and again as the troubled or intense teenager, in stories about growing up, and she is good enough at it that the industry has had no reason to stop. She has said so herself: "I'm at this weird age, too, where I'm 26 now but I'm still getting jobs for 17-year-old girls who have never kissed someone." What we have seen from her in leads, in The Starling Girl especially, suggests the grounded, unhurried work will carry into adulthood; what we have not yet seen is a director ask her to be forty.
The next interesting thing she does will be the first part in which nobody is a schoolgirl.
Biography
Eliza Jane Scanlen (born 6 January 1999) is an Australian actress. She began her career with a recurring role as Tabitha Ford in the soap opera Home and Away (2016).
Scanlen received acclaim for her performance as Amma Crellin in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects (2018). Her film roles include Milla in Babyteeth (2020) and Beth March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019). She has also appeared in The Devil All the Time (2020), Old (2021), The First Lady (2022) as young Eleanor Roosevelt, The Starling Girl (2023), Caddo Lake (2024) and the series Mayfair Witches (2023) and Dope Girls (2025).
