Kodi Smit-McPhee

Listen to Norman in ParaNorman (2012). Smit-McPhee gives the boy a flat, tired voice, the voice of a child who has stopped expecting to be listened to, and he never once pushes for a laugh. The laughs come anyway, because he is not asking for them. That is the habit that runs through everything he has done: he does less than the scene seems to want, and waits. He knows it, too. "I tend to unconsciously underplay my characters," he said in 2021, "so it's a constant that directors ask me to turn it up a little bit."

He has been the quiet boy at the edge of the frame since he was one. He started at nine, pushed along by an actor father, and had his first feature part in Romulus, My Father (2007). The Road (2009), opposite Viggo Mortensen, and Let Me In (2010) made his name as a child actor, and both parts were solitary children in bad places. ParaNorman followed, then a run of blue make-up as Nightcrawler in X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and Dark Phoenix (2019). The turn came with Peter Gordon in Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog (2021), the part most critics point to when they talk about him, and the one that made the stillness look deliberate. We have not reviewed it, so we will only say that the reputation rests there. Since then: Elvis (2022), the series Disclaimer (2024), Maria (2024), and a voice in Memoir of a Snail (2024).

The stillness is what he is good at, and it can be turned against him. In ParaNorman it is the whole performance, and it moved us more than we expected from a stop-motion ghost story; the boy sounds beaten before the film starts, so that when the last twenty minutes ask him to stand up, the effort costs something. Against Tucker Albrizzi's cheerful, unbothered Neil, the pairing is the best thing in the film, and it works because Smit-McPhee refuses to match his friend's energy.

Maria shows the other side. Pablo Larraín casts him as Mandrax, a young man with a camera crew who interviews Callas at length, and Steven Knight's script gives him a name that is also written on her pill bottles, in case we missed the point. It is a part built to listen, and Smit-McPhee listens attentively, but there is nothing behind the listening for him to do. When an actor's instinct is to hold back and the writing gives him nothing to hold back from, the result is a well-mannered blank. We scored the film 57 and he is not the reason, but he is not a reason to see it either.

The pattern of the casting is plain enough: sensitive, solitary, watching. Directors who know what to do with that get intensity; directors who only want a witness get a witness. The next phase of the career depends on whether anyone asks him to turn it up and means it.