A small furious girl swearing at heaven made Madeleine McGraw the best thing in two Scott Derrickson horror films. Whether there is an actor beyond Gwen we do not yet know, because almost nobody else has given her a part that size.
Fi1m perspective
Gwen Blake swears at heaven. That was the first thing we noticed about Madeleine McGraw in The Black Phone (2021): a small furious girl who treats prayer as an argument she means to win, and it is still what we notice in Black Phone 2 (2025), where the whole film is built around her dreams. She follows them into the snow, to a Christian camp in the mountains, and Scott Derrickson hands her the fear, the plot and most of the jokes. She carries all three and does not once ask us to feel sorry for her.
She has been working since she was small. The debut was American Sniper (2014), and after it came the work a child actor gets: a voice in Cars 3 (2017), the younger version of somebody else in Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) and Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), regular parts in Outcast (2016–2018) and later Secrets of Sulphur Springs (2021–2023). She took over Bonnie in Toy Story 4 (2019), a film we liked and whose review did not mention her. A child's voice in a well-made Pixar film is heard and not noticed, and that is the job. None of it told us who she was. Gwen did.
What she does in the Derrickson films is refuse to be the child in peril. Horror is full of frightened children and most of them are there to be rescued or lost. McGraw plays fear as something that makes Gwen angrier rather than smaller, and the anger is funny, and the film knows it. Pär M. Ekberg shoots her waking life in flat, overcast grey and her dreams on grainy, skipping film the colour of rust, and she is the one person who has to live in both, so the whole picture rests on our believing that she does. We sat through a great deal of explaining in Black Phone 2, and a sermon we had not ordered, and we forgave it every time she came back on, because she is the only person in the film who takes its horrors as an insult rather than a mystery.
The question now is what else there is. Two films with one director in one part is a strong start and a narrow one. She has been called a scream queen and has said the label came as a surprise, and it fits her badly; the term means a girl who reacts, and Gwen acts. Asked about the part, she has said, 'She’s outspoken, fearless, and follows her instincts—even when it’s scary.' She has started producing, with Double Trouble (2026). What we would like to see next is a film with no dead man in it, so we can find out how much of the fury is Gwen's and how much is hers.
Biography
Madeleine McGraw is an American actress. She is known for playing Gwen Blake in the horror films The Black Phone (2021) and its sequel Black Phone 2 (2025).
McGraw began her career as a child actress with roles in American Sniper (2014) and voice work in Cars 3 (2017) and Toy Story 4 (2019). She has appeared in the Marvel film Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) as a young Hope van Dyne, the Disney Channel series Secrets of Sulphur Springs (2021–2023) as Zoey Campbell, and the series Outcast (2016–2018). She received a Saturn Award nomination for her performance in The Black Phone.
She has two brothers and a sister who are also actors.
