Joseph Mazzello was the boy in Jurassic Park, and the grown-up actor is quieter than that fact suggests: a supporting player who lets a character change without telling us it is happening, usually while standing next to someone louder.
Fi1m perspective
Eugene Sledge arrives in The Pacific (2010) late, soft-faced and eager, and over the hours that follow the softness goes. What Mazzello does not do is mark the moment. There is no scene in which the boy becomes the man; he is a little harder each time we see him, and we register the change the way we register a friend has aged. It is the most patient piece of acting in a series that has almost no patience with anyone.
He had been on screen since before he could read. A small part in Presumed Innocent (1990), then Tim Murphy in Jurassic Park (1993), then Shadowlands the same year and The River Wild (1994) opposite Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon. Our review of Jurassic Park does not single him out, and that is fair: Spielberg's film is about wanting to stand and stare, and the children are there to be looked after. He went to film school in 2001 and more or less vanished from screens for the best part of a decade. He came back in 2010 with two parts at once, Sledge and Dustin Moskovitz in The Social Network, and has since made a trade of playing real people in ensembles, most visibly John Deacon in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), where he was reunited with Rami Malek.
The pattern is the supporting man beside the bigger noise. In The Pacific the noise is Malek's Snafu Shelton, who does his acting with a stare and a slow chewing jaw and is the one you remember. We remembered him too, and it was only afterwards, thinking the series over, that we realised Sledge was the character whose change we had actually watched, and that Mazzello had made that possible by never once asking for our attention. That is a virtue with a cost. An actor who refuses to announce himself gets praised for preparation and authenticity, which is what people say about the bass player. We have not reviewed Bohemian Rhapsody, and will only note that he has said more of his lines in it were ad-libbed than scripted, which tells you how much the script had given him to work with.
He has directed as well, a feature called Undrafted (2016), and he has acted with David Strathairn four times and under Spielberg three, which suggests he is the sort of colleague people ask back. Whether anyone builds a part around him rather than beside him is another matter. On the evidence of Sledge, he would know what to do with one.
Biography
Joseph Mazzello, also credited as Joe Mazzello, is an American actor born on 21 September 1983 in Rhinebeck, New York. He began his career as a child actor and played Tim Murphy in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993).
Mazzello's other notable roles include a cameo as Tim in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Dustin Moskovitz in The Social Network (2010), Eugene Sledge in the HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), and John Deacon in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). He studied at the University of Southern California.
