Izabela Vidovic

Every so often in Wonder (2017) a name comes up on screen and the film hands itself to somebody else. One of these chapters belongs to Via, the older sister, who describes her brother Auggie as the sun and the rest of the family as planets, and who starts high school to find that her friend Miranda will not look at her. Izabela Vidovic plays her as a girl who has learnt never to ask for anything and is beginning to resent the lesson. We scored the film 68 and found it never in doubt about anything, and still it was Via, not Auggie, who got at us, because the not-asking is done so quietly it takes a while to notice what it costs her.

That was the breakthrough, not the beginning. Vidovic was on stage from about the age of seven and on television from 2011, with guest parts in Raising Hope and Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, and in Homefront (2013) she played Maddy Broker opposite Jason Statham. Then came the recurring work: About a Boy (2014–2015), Taylor Shaw in The Fosters (2015–2018) and, after Wonder, the young Kara in Supergirl from 2017 to 2021, with arcs in iZombie (2018) and Veronica Mars (2019) as Matty Ross. Read the list and a pattern shows. She is cast as the older sister or the younger self, the person standing beside the story or before it.

It is not a bad place to work from. Playing the younger version of an established character means studying someone else's mannerisms and reproducing them without tipping into impression, and by her own account that is how she prepared for Supergirl. The director who has got the most from her is still Stephen Chbosky, who she says took a personal interest in each of his actors, and in Wonder we can see what that bought: a supporting player allowed to be a person rather than an example.

The other thing she has done is stop waiting to be cast. Through Almost Normal Productions, the company her mother Elizabeta Vidovic co-founded and where Kathryn Michelle is a regular collaborator, she produces and writes as well as acts, and in The Accursed (2021) she did both, playing Sunny and co-producing. "I look for three-dimensional characters," she said in 2017, "roles that are written with many layers." Every actor says that. Fewer go off and start writing them.

For now Wonder is the one to click through to, and the caveat is that it is the only film of hers we can speak for. On that evidence she is better than the parts she has been given, which have all been parts about somebody else. Via calls her brother the sun and everyone else planets. Vidovic has been a planet in every part since, and a good one.