Isabelle Fuhrman
Isabelle Fuhrman is an actor, born 1997.
Isabelle Fuhrman was born in Washington, DC, in 1997 and had a career-defining role before she was a teenager. She played Esther in the 2009 horror film Orphan, a part that required her to hold a whole film's worth of menace behind an entirely composed face, and the film worked because she never once played the character as a child pretending to be sinister.
Thirteen years later she went back. Orphan: First Kill, the 2022 prequel, put her in the same role at an age when the part should have been impossible, and the film is worth watching partly as a technical exercise in how she solved it. In between she took the sort of work that follows a horror breakout: Clove in The Hunger Games, the tribute who is genuinely frightening in a cast of frightened teenagers, then Cell, Down a Dark Hall, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, and a run on Masters of Sex.
The most interesting thing she has done is the least commercial. In The Novice she plays Alex in an independent film with no genre cover and nothing to hide behind, and it is the clearest evidence that the stillness in Orphan was a choice and not a limit. Since 2024 she has appeared as Diamond Kittredge in the Horizon: An American Saga films, a western series that gives her a very different register to work in.
Movies (21)
- Signal One (2026)
- The Hunger Games (2012)
- Orphan (2009)
- Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024)
- After Earth (2013)
- Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)
- Orphan: First Kill (2022)
- A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures (2010)
- Cell (2016)
- Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2 (2024)
- Hounddog (2008)
- Down a Dark Hall (2018)
- Wish You Were Here (2025)
- Children of the Corn (2009)
- Sheroes (2023)
- Dear Eleanor (2016)
- The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021)
- Unit 234 (2024)
- The World Is Watching: Making the Hunger Games (2012)
- The Novice (2021)
- All the Wilderness (2014)
TV (2)
Where to start with Isabelle Fuhrman
Orphan first, obviously, and go in cold if you can, because the pleasure of it is watching a child actor make a room full of adults look slow. Then The Novice, which is the one nobody saw and the one that shows what she can do without a mask on: it is punishing and unglamorous, and the whole thing rests on her.
After that, The Hunger Games for the version of her that most people met, a supporting part played with real relish. Orphan: First Kill is the curio and works best once you already know the original. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Down a Dark Hall are competent genre pieces she elevates a little, and Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is the current chapter of her career, though the film is more interested in its scale than in any one performance.