Robert MacNaughton
Robert MacNaughton is an actor, born 1966.
Three credits sit on this page and one of them is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. MacNaughton played Michael, Elliott's older brother, which in that film means the one who has to stay sensible while everything around him stops making sense, and it won him a Young Artist Award for best young supporting actor. Sources disagree on whether that award belongs to 1982 or 1983, so trust neither year.
He led I Am the Cheese the following year, playing Adam Farmer in an adaptation of Robert Cormier's novel; it is not among the credits listed here. After that the screen work effectively stopped. There is a CBS Schoolbreak Special, an episode of Amen, and by his own biography a working life that went to the theatre instead. Not every child actor is meant to become an adult star, and this record is short rather than sad.
Movies (1)
TV (2)
Where to start with Robert MacNaughton
There is only one real place to begin, and everybody has already been there: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Watch Michael rather than Elliott this time. The performance is doing something quietly difficult, playing the older kid who grasps the stakes and has to hold a household together, and it is a large part of why that family feels lived in rather than staged.
After that the page thins fast. CBS Schoolbreak Special is an anthology slot from 1984, interesting mainly as a document of how American television used to address teenagers. Amen is a sitcom guest spot. Everything else he did happened on a stage, where nobody filmed it.