Nico Parker

In How to Train Your Dragon (2025), Parker makes Astrid’s wariness look like ambition rather than spite. We warmed to her because that choice gave us someone to understand, not merely someone being difficult. Dean DeBlois’s largely faithful live-action remake offers few such reasons to reconsider the familiar characters, although Mason Thames’s quick, dry Hiccup is another. The film is longer and slower than the animation, and Parker’s contribution is a welcome detail in a retelling we found largely unnecessary.

Her screen debut was Milly Farrier in Tim Burton’s Dumbo (2019), another fantasy with too little interest in its human characters. The elephant is touching, and Danny DeVito and the circus offer some pleasure during the waits for him to take centre stage. We could not recommend the film, but the writing gives Parker so little help that it would be unfair to treat its weak human drama as a verdict on her ability.

The Last of Us (2023) brought wider notice for her Sarah Miller in the opening episode, after supporting work in The Third Day (2020) and Reminiscence (2021). With Suncoast (2024), she took a first leading role as Doris in an independent coming-of-age drama. Its grief and emotional conflict give her more to work with than the human scenes in Dumbo. These are the parts worth pursuing: young people with complicated feelings, given enough space for those feelings to affect the film.

As Chloe in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025), she appears in a film we prefer to either fantasy remake, despite its bagginess. Zellweger and Grant supply its most rewarding work about getting older; Parker’s presence is not the reason for our recommendation. Astrid remains the more useful demonstration of what interests us in her acting: a clear sense of why a character behaves as she does. We would like to see that care applied to a script with fewer obligations to an earlier film. For a fuller part, try Suncoast.