Mason Thames

The thing to watch with Mason Thames is the moment he stops. In Idiots (2026), Macon Blair puts him in the back seat of a car as Sheridan, a rich teenager who has never been told no in a tone that meant it, and for an hour he is funny, all boredom and entitlement. Then the film changes its mind about him, and Thames lets us see it coming in a face that simply goes quiet. We had been enjoying him and then, without a line to mark it, we were not, and the speed of that turn unsettled us more than anything the plot went on to do with it. It is the best acting in a film that does not know what to do with him afterwards.

That stillness is his stock in trade. He came up through horror, as Finney Blake in Scott Derrickson's The Black Phone (2021), and returned to the part in Black Phone 2 (2025), where Finn is a boy who got out and did not come back whole, quiet and quick to anger. Between the two he took the lead in Dean DeBlois's live-action How to Train Your Dragon (2025) as Hiccup, and turned up as the romantic lead in Regretting You (2025). It is a busy run for someone born in 2007, and nearly all of it is on other people's property: a remake, a sequel, an adaptation, a reprise.

What he brings to borrowed material is a lack of fuss. His Hiccup is quick and dry and visibly frightened of Gerard Butler's Stoick, and he carries the film's long middle stretch with almost no help from a script that is mostly the 2010 one said again. Opposite Ethan Hawke's mask in Black Phone 2 he never competes with the voice; he lets the fear sit in his shoulders and waits. Four years of ballet may account for some of that: he knows where his body is, and he does not move it unless he means to.

The three films of his we have reviewed sit between 60 and 64, and he is not the reason for any of those scores. Black Phone 2 belongs to Madeleine McGraw, and Thames knows it and gets out of her way. That is a virtue in a supporting actor and an open question in a lead. We have not yet seen him asked to hold a whole picture on his own account, with nobody in the front seat and no dragon to share the frame, and we do not know whether he can. He is due back as Hiccup in 2027. We would rather see him in something nobody has made before, where the stillness has to do all the work.