Child Actors Talk About Starring In Movies They Were Too Young To Understand

Popular culture seems to have a fixation with the idea of the uncanny child. In Orphan, this manifests in the dark story of a couple who adopt a child, only to discover she is, in fact, a 30-something psychopathic murderer who has used her masquerade as a child to trick her victims. Despite the film’s somewhat mixed reception among critics, the performance of Isabelle Furhman as the girl/woman Esther received particular praise. This is no small thing, considering she was only 10 when the movie was made. 

In the film, Esther says some sexually related things that are very much beyond the pale, and she even tries to seduce her adopted father. In an interview, Furhman recalled how acting in those scenes posed its own challenges, as well as how the production team coached her delivery:

That, to me, was explained as “He is somebody that you love, who thinks that you’re absolutely disgusting, and doesn’t want to be anywhere around you.” That is the basis of what sexual rejection feels like, but no one explained it to me in terms of sex. You don’t experience that until you grow up, but the emotion was the same… Other things, too. I remember that iconic line, “I’ll cut your hairless little pr*ck off before you even figure out what it’s for.” I didn’t even know what it was for!

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has earned significant criticism for misrepresenting the horrors of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it did receive some well-deserved praise for the performances of its cast, including Asa Butterfield, a German boy who befriends a Jewish boy imprisoned in a concentration camp. Several years before he was to appear in the widely lauded Netflix series Sex Education, Butterfield was demonstrating a significant amount of talent. 

Given the film’s weighty subject matter, it makes sense it would take some time for Butterfield, who was only 11 at the time, to fully grasp its full import. When later asked whether the film was emotionally difficult to make, he responded: 

Yes. It was all hard. When I did the scene towards the end I realized that this actually happened to people. That made it very sad.

Steven Spielberg's Schindler’s List, a black-and-white film, is a rich and emotionally devastating look at the effects of the Holocaust. One notable spot of color in the film is a girl in a red coat, who is first seen in the streets, and later amid the bodies loaded onto a cart. 

Oliwia Dabrowska, who was 3 during filming, throughout her childhood experienced a great deal of shame over playing the role, though later she realized: “I had been part of something I could be proud of.”

Spielberg advised Dabrowska against seeing the film until she was much older, but she watched it at age 11 - and regretted her decision, as she said in an interview:

It was too horrible. I could not understand much, but I was sure that I didn't want to watch ever again in my life.

The 1970s were a golden age for rich and atmospheric horror films, including The Omen. With its story of a family who unsuspectingly is raising the Antichrist, it still manages to evoke chills and terror. Much of this is thanks to the performance of Harvey Stephens, who was only 4 when cast. 

The Omen has many frightening scenes, but one of the most memorable occurs when the family goes to an animal park, where the animals violently react. The baboons are particularly terrifying, not just for the audience, but also for Stephens, who noted in an interview just how frightening they were in person: 

They got a baboon, stuck him in the back of the car… with a soldier with a gun. I sh*tted myself. Of course I was scared. That wasn't acting. That was me petrified.

He also noted:

When you’re that young, even though it looks scary to other people, when you’re there as you all know there’s a million people when you’re filming those things. It’s not scary at all. Apart from the baboons.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita remains one of the most notorious novels, thanks in large part to its central story, which focuses on a man’s illicit desire for the titular young girl. It has been adapted to film a number of times, including in 1997. In this adaptation, Lolita is portrayed by the young Dominique Swain, who was 15 when she was cast. 

Unfortunately, while she received significant critical praise for her performance, the role of Lolita seemed to be a bit of a double-edged sword. To her credit, Swain was defensive of her own reputation and work. As she remarked in a lengthy interview: 

I turned down stuff specifically because of nudity, because it doesn't take a whole lot of class to yank your clothes off. Because I had a body double in Lolita I think the goal was, “Let's see what she really looks like.” They were sending me scripts with no substance to them.

Brooke Shields has had a remarkably varied career in Hollywood, appearing in everything from prestige film dramas to TV sitcoms. She catapulted into stardom due to her appearance, at age 12, in the film Pretty Baby, which centers on a young girl, played by Shields, who is forced into prostitution by her mother.  

Understandably, many of the film’s scenes were a source of consternation to the young Shields, who often struggled not to visibly show her displeasure. Fortunately for her, she was surrounded by a supportive coterie of co-stars, one of whom was Keith Carradine. As she recounted to Diane Rehm, describing a kissing scene with the actor: 

He must have just been tortured by it… He’s thinking, “I don’t want to scar this kid”… Keith took me aside and he said, "Hey, come here, I’ve got something to tell ya… You know that this doesn’t count, right?”