Jenna Boyd
Jenna Boyd is an actor, born 1993.
Jenna Boyd had a 2003 that most actors never get: three films in one year, as a child, and two of them serious. She is Loretta Kravitz in the manhunt thriller The Hunted, Sally Finney in the comedy Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, and, most substantially, Dot Gilkeson in The Missing, Ron Howard's cold and unsentimental western, which asks a young performer to hold long stretches of a very grim story. Two years later she was Bailey in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Then, as happens to most child actors, the work thinned out. The return is the part worth knowing about: Paige Hardaway in Atypical, across all four seasons of the Netflix comedy drama, a role that gave her adult comedy of a very particular kind, precise, fast, and airless in a way the show used on purpose.
Her earliest credit here is a small one on the sitcom Titus, and the most recent is Sabrina in Good Mourning. The shape of the career is a familiar one, and the Atypical run is the argument that the child performances were never the ceiling.
Movies (5)
TV (2)
Where to start with Jenna Boyd
The strongest thing here is The Missing. Ron Howard's western is hard and unglamorous, and Boyd plays the younger daughter opposite Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones without ever looking like a child actor being managed through a scene. Start there.
Atypical is the other essential and the one to spend real time with: four seasons across which Paige Hardaway grows from a comic device into the most interesting person on the show. If you want the adult career rather than the child one, this is it.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is the emotional entry, a supporting role carrying far more weight than its size, and The Hunted is the tense thriller with the smallest part. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star is the strangest item on the list, a broad comedy about exactly what she was at the time, and Good Mourning is the recent oddity.