Julia Sarah Stone
Julia Sarah Stone is an actor, born 1997.
Stone started early and deliberately: theatre classes from the age of six, a run of school plays, a small part in an independent short in 2009, and then a lead in the 2011 feature The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom that won her a Young Artist Award.
The path afterwards was the Canadian one rather than the Los Angeles one, and it has served her better than the alternative usually does. She took the pilot of the CW medical series Emily Owens, M.D. and a role in the third season of AMC's The Killing, but the substantial work is in independent film: Mina in Wim Wenders' Every Thing Will Be Fine, Eva in The Unseen, a different Eva in Allure, Sarah in Come True.
What she is good at is a watchful blankness that reads older than the parts are written. She gets cast as a girl the film is anxious about, and she plays those girls without asking the audience to be anxious with her: no signalling, no pleading, a great deal carried on the face and very little in the line readings. Come True, where she has the lead, is the clearest demonstration of it. She is back on television in Off Campus.
Movies (4)
TV (5)
Where to start with Julia Sarah Stone
Take Come True first. It is a low-budget Canadian science-fiction horror that rests on her, and the atmosphere holds largely because she declines to play frightened in the obvious way.
Allure is the harder watch and the better performance, an uncomfortable drama that hands her the most complicated relationship on this list. The Unseen is the modest one, quieter and more of a family drama than its premise implies. Every Thing Will Be Fine is the prestige credit, a slow Wenders picture where she has a small part.
For television, The Killing is the strongest series she has been in, though her involvement runs to a single season, and Aftermath is genre television chiefly interesting as contrast. Emily Owens, M.D. and R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour are early. Off Campus is the most recent.