Charlie Plummer
Charlie Plummer is an actor, born 1999.
Charlie Plummer started as a child actor in short films, made his feature debut in David Chase's Not Fade Away, and picked up early television on Boardwalk Empire and Granite Flats before King Jack gave him a lead in 2015. None of that predicted how fast the next stretch would arrive: John Paul Getty III in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World, then Charley in Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete, which won him the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best emerging actor.
His gift is stillness, and specifically the ability to be interesting while doing almost nothing. Plummer plays boys who absorb what happens to them, and he holds a camera without pushing, so an audience leans in to read him. Lean on Pete is built on that. So is Words on Bathroom Walls, and so is the uneasy quiet of The Clovehitch Killer, where the assignment is to notice things and say nothing.
Since then he has taken the wider spread a young actor with an independent reputation usually takes: the studio disaster picture Moonfall, a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt in The First Lady, Telemachus in The Return and Gary Barkovitch in The Long Walk. The smaller films are still the better use of him, and he seems to know it.
Movies (14)
TV (2)
Where to start with Charlie Plummer
Lean on Pete is the one to watch first and the real answer to what he can do. It is slow, it is sad, and Plummer carries nearly all of it, often alone in frame with a horse. From there, King Jack is the rough early version of the same quality, shot before anyone was paying attention.
For range, All the Money in the World puts him at the centre of a big-budget thriller about a kidnapping, and The Clovehitch Killer converts his blankness into suspense. Looking for Alaska is the most comfortable way in if you like young-adult adaptations, and Words on Bathroom Walls is the warmest thing here. Moonfall is the paycheck, worth it for the spectacle rather than for him.