Julia Butters

Midway through Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton is working a day on a Western pilot, fluffing his lines and then screaming at himself in his trailer. Between takes a child co-star sits down beside him and talks to him about the work as one professional to another, and later she tells him something kind. Julia Butters was ten. She plays Trudi Fraser as the most serious person on the set, and when the kind line comes she says it straight, with no sense that she is comforting him. We were moved more than we expected to be, and it was her doing: she does not act the kindness, and DiCaprio's face does the rest.

It was her breakout, and she has said as much. She had been working since she was two, in commercials, and had spent four seasons as Anna-Kat Otto on the sitcom American Housewife (2016–2020) when Tarantino cast her. She left the sitcom for films afterwards. The Gray Man (2022) followed, and then The Fabelmans (2022), in which she plays Reggie, one of the sisters in Spielberg's account of his own childhood. Our review did not single her out, and that is fair to her rather than against her: the film belongs to Michelle Williams and Paul Dano as the parents, and the children are there to watch them.

Freakier Friday (2025) gave her something nearer a lead, or a quarter of one. As Harper Coleman with Lindsay Lohan's Anna inside her, she gets the panic of a grown woman stuck in a school corridor and handles it well. The trouble is not hers. The film has four people swapping bodies and a plot that keeps stopping to remind us of the first one, so nobody is on screen long enough to build anything. It tells us she can be funny under pressure. It does not tell us whether she can hold a film on her own.

What she has, so far, is stillness and seriousness, and she has been cast for them each time: the wise child, the one who has read the script more carefully than the adults. That is a useful thing to be at ten and a limiting thing to be at twenty. She has said, "You can’t play a character if you don’t know who you are underneath it," which is a large claim at sixteen, and the Trudi scene suggests she may be entitled to it. The next few years will show whether the solemnity was a talent or a phase. Until then, the few minutes beside DiCaprio between takes are the reason to know her name.