Jonathan Brandis
Jonathan Brandis is an actor, born 1976.
He began as a child model, moved into commercials, and made his acting debut in 1982 as Kevin Buchanan on the soap opera One Life to Live. By the end of that decade he was working steadily in horror and family pictures, and in 1990 he had the year that defined him: Bill Denbrough in the television miniseries of It, and Bastian Bux in The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter, one of them a genuinely frightening piece of television and the other the lead in a studio fantasy sequel.
In 1993, at the age of 17, seaQuest DSV cast him as the teenage prodigy Lucas Wolenczak. The character was popular with teenage viewers and he became a fixture of the teen magazines, which is a particular kind of fame and an unusually difficult one to convert into an adult career.
The last stretch of the filmography is the interesting one. Mousy in Outside Providence, Cave Wyatt in Ride with the Devil and Private Wakely in Hart's War are all small, unglamorous supporting parts in films made for adults, and together they read as an actor deliberately taking the poster apart and starting again from the bottom. He was doing good voice work in the same period, as Mozenrath in the Aladdin animated series. He died in 2003, and the documentary kid 90 later used archive footage of him. What is here is a fraction of the career it should have been.
Movies (12)
- Pet Sematary (1989)
- Oliver & Company (1988)
- The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990)
- Hart's War (2002)
- Stepfather 2 (1989)
- Ride with the Devil (1999)
- kid 90 (2021)
- Sidekicks (1992)
- The Wrong Guys (1988)
- Ladybugs (1992)
- Masters of Illusion: The Wizards of Special Effects (1994)
- Outside Providence (1999)
TV (5)
Where to start with Jonathan Brandis
seaQuest DSV is the credit that made him famous and the one most visitors are looking for, but it is not where I would start.
Begin with It, where the childhood half of the story does the heavy lifting and his Bill Denbrough carries a great deal of it, then The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter if you want the fantasy lead, with the warning that it is a much lesser film than the one it follows. The adult work is the real reward: Outside Providence is warm and funny and unforced, Ride with the Devil is a serious Civil War drama that almost nobody saw, and Hart's War gives him careful, quiet supporting work in a prisoner-of-war film. Sidekicks is the purest early-nineties artefact on the page, and Aladdin has his best voice performance.