Théodore Pellerin

Jasper gets on the bus in Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and starts talking, and he does not stop. Eliza Hittman's film is built around two girls who say almost nothing, so a boy who fills every silence is a hazard by design, and the script treats him as one. What Pellerin adds is the sense that Jasper has not noticed. He reads Skylar's tiredness and her boredom and takes both as encouragement, and he is pleasant about it, which is worse. It is a small part and he does not inflate it; he lets the girls keep the film and hangs about its edges like someone who might turn out to be useful.

That is the Pellerin part, on the evidence of the one film of his we have reviewed and the reputation he built before it. He came up on Quebec television, on 30 vies from 2014, then through Philippe Lesage's The Demons (2015) and Genesis (2018) and a small role as the young Antoine in Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World (2016). The turn was Sophie Dupuis's Family First (2018), a lead as Vincent that made his name at home and began a partnership that has run through Souterrain (2020) and Solo (2023). The English-language work came alongside: Boy Erased (2018), Hittman's film, and later Beau Is Afraid (2023), Lurker (2025) and the title role in Pauline Loquès's Nino (2025). We have not reviewed the Dupuis films and will not pretend to have weighed them. What is plain from the parts is that directors keep casting him as the volatile one, the entitled one, the boy who wants company and pursues it past the point of comfort.

What he does with those parts is worth describing. He is physically busy and then, without warning, still, and the stillness is where the threat or the hurt sits. Jasper leans in, gestures, laughs at his own lines, and then waits, and the waiting is the only honest thing about him. It suits the kind of small independent film about families and people at the margins that he has kept making, in both his languages, rather than trading up. The one moment in Hittman's picture that moved us more than anything spoken in it, a gesture between the cousins near the end that we will not describe, would not happen without Jasper, and it would not land if Pellerin had played him as a cartoon. We felt for the girls and, uncomfortably, a little for him.

The risk is obvious. An actor who is good at unease gets offered unease, and a career of chatty boys from the bus would waste whatever made Dupuis go back to him three times. Nino and Lurker suggest the leads are coming. We would like to see him given a part where nobody is frightened of him, to find out what is left when he is not the one everybody else is watching warily.