Onni Tommila
Three films carry this career, and all three are worth the trip. Tommila, a Finnish actor, first appeared as a child in the 2005 short Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions, then led Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) as Pietari, the boy who works out what has been dug out of the mountain long before any adult will listen to him.
Four years later he was the lead of Big Game (2014), playing Oskari, a boy sent alone into the forest for a rite of passage that goes spectacularly wrong. Both films ask a young performer to be the only competent person on screen, and he manages it without the knowing cuteness that usually ruins such parts.
He also voiced Eetu in the animated Eetu ja Konna (2011) and appeared in Last Cowboy Standing (2009). His most recent credit here is the smallest: a German soldier in Sisu (2022), a supporting adult role in a film built entirely around somebody else.
Movies (3)
Where to start with Onni Tommila
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale first, without hesitation. It is a genuinely odd Finnish Christmas film and his performance as Pietari is what holds it together, a child taking a ludicrous situation with complete seriousness while the grown-ups flounder.
Big Game is the bigger, sillier, English-language follow-up, and it is essentially the same character given a larger budget and an American co-star. Watch them in order and the pairing is very satisfying; watch the second one alone and it looks like a thinner film than it is.
Sisu is the grown-up postscript, a small role in a violent, near-wordless action picture. He is barely in it, but it answers the obvious question about what happened to the kid.