Julia Butters
Julia Butters is an actor, born 2009.
Julia Butters had already been working for five years by the time the part everybody remembers arrived. She began as a child, with credits going back to Transparent in 2014 and small film roles in Term Life and 13 Hours in 2016, then landed Anna-Kat Otto on American Housewife, which ran from 2016 to 2020 and gave her years of weekly comic training.
Then Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019, where she played Trudi Fraser and got a Critics' Choice nomination for Best Young Actor/Actress out of it. The part is small and it is the one people quote, which tells you something about how much she does with a scene.
2022 was the confirmation year: Reggie Fabelman in The Fabelmans and Claire in The Gray Man, an autobiographical art film and a very expensive action picture within months of each other. Since then she has taken Harper Coleman in Freakier Friday, Davey in The Paper, and Lily Brass in Queen of Bones, plus voice work in Monsters at Work and Adventure Time: Distant Lands.
She is still a teenager, which makes the interesting question the one nobody can answer yet. Child performers who are this precise this early usually get typed as the precocious one. The Fabelmans suggests she has more registers than that.
Movies (8)
TV (6)
Where to start with Julia Butters
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the correct first stop, and take Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood as an acting exercise rather than a period piece: her scenes are the ones people quote, and she plays them without ever asking for sympathy.
Follow it with The Fabelmans, the warmer and more difficult performance, and the best evidence that the first one was not a fluke. American Housewife is the volume work, four years of sitcom rhythm, and it explains the timing.
If you want the range rather than the highlights, The Gray Man is the big-budget action entry and Freakier Friday hands her a legacy franchise. Queen of Bones and The Paper are the current work, both worth watching to see where she goes next.