Logan Lerman

Watch him in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) whenever someone speaks to him. Charlie answers, but we can see him decide to. Lerman plays the boy's reserve as work: talking costs him something the other pupils never have to pay, and the strain shows in the pause before a line and the small relief after it. Most young actors play shyness as silence. He plays it as effort, and he keeps Charlie's troubles present without turning every conversation into an announcement of them.

That was the film that made critics take him seriously, and it came after a long apprenticeship. He was in commercials from the mid-1990s and had child parts in The Patriot (2000) and What Women Want (2000), a television lead in Jack & Bobby (2004–2005) and a supporting role in 3:10 to Yuma (2007). Then came Percy Jackson (2010–2013), the franchise lead that put him in front of a large audience and, by most accounts, showed little of what he could do. The reserve that makes Charlie interesting makes a demigod look faintly absent.

The years after Perks are where his reputation sits. Fury (2014), for David Ayer, put him in a tank as Norman Ellison and asked for something harder and more physical than he had done before; Noah (2014) came the same year; Indignation (2016) gave him Marcus Messner and long stretches of dense dialogue, and critics noticed how precisely he handled them. There is a fair charge that his standing rests on a few careful choices rather than a steady run of films. He would not, we suspect, argue. "I just want to work with good filmmakers," he said in 2014. "I don’t want to do repetitive roles; they’re too boring."

Stephen Chbosky is still the director who has got the most out of him, because Chbosky built a film around exactly the quality Lerman has. We were moved, in Perks, by the friendship Sam and Patrick offer Charlie, and it was Lerman who did it: his relief at being included is so uncertain that we did not trust it to last, and so we watched him closely for the moment it would be taken away. Put the same actor in Bullet Train (2022) as The Son, one small part in a loud film, and our review did not mention him. That is not a mark against him. Nobody quiet survives in that film.

He has gone back to television with Hunters (2020–2023), started producing, and in 2025 told an interviewer he still felt at the beginning of his career. On the evidence, the best of it comes when a director wants the effort he puts into keeping quiet, and the least of it when somebody wants a hero. Give him a part where joining in is hard, and he will show you what it costs.