Shawn Ashmore

Shawn Ashmore, born in Richmond, British Columbia in 1979, has an identical twin who is also an actor, which is the sort of fact that follows a career around whether or not it is relevant. He started young. He was nominated for a Gemini at fourteen for the television film Guitarman, played Jake Berenson in Nickelodeon's Animorphs from 1998, Tyler Connell in Disney Channel's In a Heartbeat, and Brad Rigby in Cadet Kelly in 2002.

Most of the world knows him as Bobby Drake, Iceman, in the X-Men films, of which this catalogue holds Days of Future Past. It is a franchise part rather than a showcase, and what he did with the visibility it gave him is more interesting than the role itself: he went and became a horror lead. The Ruins in 2008 and Frozen in 2010 are the two to point at, both small-cast horror films that put him under sustained pressure with nowhere to hide.

Since then it has been a steady procedural career, Mike Weston across The Following from 2013 and Wesley Evers on The Rookie from 2018, alongside a continuing run of genre films and the interactive-media work his own biography lists alongside film and television. He is the rare child actor who converted into a working adult career without a reinvention or a scandal, which is unglamorous and much harder than it looks.