Chandler Riggs
Chandler Riggs is an actor, born 1999.
Chandler Riggs was cast in one of the biggest shows on American cable before he was a teenager. Born in Atlanta in 1999, he came up through childhood theatre productions, and his first film role, Tom in Get Low, arrived in the same year as his first television role, Carl Grimes on The Walking Dead. Both landed in 2010.
Carl ran until 2018, which means Riggs did the whole of his adolescence inside a hit horror series, on camera, with the audience watching him change physically from season to season. That is a difficult way to learn a job, and the performance did improve: the early seasons mostly ask him to be endangered, while the later ones hand him grief, fury and moral argument, and he holds them. The work was recognized in genre circles with three Saturn Awards from five nominations and a Young Artist Award from three.
What follows a childhood like that is the hard part, and Riggs has taken it slowly. He did a horror picture, Keep Watching, and a small role in Mercy, played PJ on A Million Little Things, voiced Carl one more time for a Robot Chicken special and voiced Superman in an animated crossover feature. Archive footage of him turns up in The Walking Dead: The Return. He is also a musician. The screen career is a smaller thing now than the one he had as a child, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
Movies (6)
TV (3)
Where to start with Chandler Riggs
There is only one real entry point and everybody already knows it: The Walking Dead. Start at the beginning, because the interest is cumulative. You are watching a child actor grow into a role in real time, and the middle seasons are where Carl stops being a plot obligation and becomes a character with his own argument about how to survive.
Outside that, Get Low is easily the best film on the list, a quiet period piece with Bill Murray in it, and Riggs is fine in a small part. Mercy and Keep Watching are horror programmers for the curious rather than the recommended. A Million Little Things is the clearest look at him as an adult performer, and Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes & Huntsmen, Part One is the odd late credit where he voices Superman. The Walking Dead: The Return is archive footage rather than a performance, so treat it as an epilogue.