Lukas Haas

Lukas Haas was eight when he played the Amish boy in Witness, and the performance is the reason the film's premise works at all: a child who has seen something, inside a community that does not want to be seen. He carried a major studio thriller opposite Harrison Ford before he could reliably read a script.

What happened next is the interesting part, because it is what almost never happens. He kept working, quietly, for four decades, without a second breakout and without disappearing either. Lady in White, Mars Attacks!, Brick, Alpha Dog, Inception, Lincoln, The Revenant, Widows, First Man, Babylon. Read that list again and notice that these are mostly among the biggest films of their years, and that in most of them he has four or five scenes.

That is a genuine career shape and a rare one. He has become the actor directors bring back, a familiar and slightly recessive presence who can occupy the edge of a frame without pulling focus: Nash in Inception, Michael Collins in First Man, one of the early colleagues in Jobs. He is also a musician, and he turned up as himself in Zoolander, which is its own peculiar kind of milestone.

The honest summary is that he has appeared in a great many great films and led very few of them, and the second fact has not stopped the first from continuing for forty years.