Brandon Soo Hoo
Brandon Soo Hoo is an actor, born 1995.
He was still a child when Tropic Thunder (2008) put him in front of the largest audience he has had. Playing Tran, the young leader of a drug gang in a satire about actors, he had to hold his own against a cast of adults doing very broad comedy, and he did, which is why the credit followed him for the next decade.
Trained as a martial artist, he moved quickly into work that used it. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) cast him as the young Storm Shadow, Ender's Game (2013) gave him Fly Molo among the cadets, and From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series made him a series regular as Scott Fuller, the closest he has come to a long-form part. Between them, the Cartoon Network sketch series Incredible Crew let him do comedy at length.
Animation has taken over much of the recent work, and it suits him: two turns as Beast Boy in the DC features Justice League vs. Teen Titans (2016) and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract (2017), Stanford Yu in Mech Cadets, and Tom Lee in The Tiger's Apprentice (2024). This is a career that started at the top of the visibility ladder and has since settled into steady genre and voice work, which is a far more normal shape for a child actor than the Tropic Thunder credit implies.
Movies (11)
TV (3)
Where to start with Brandon Soo Hoo
His most-seen credit is also the most uncomfortable one. Tropic Thunder aims its cruelty at movie stars rather than at him, and the performance is genuinely good, but go in knowing what the film is. Watch it first anyway, because everything after it is a reaction to it.
Then From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, the only place he is given an arc rather than a function, and Ender's Game if you want to see him doing small precise work inside a large ensemble. The animation is the easiest watch: Justice League vs. Teen Titans and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract make a decent pair, and Mech Cadets is the family-friendly one. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is a few minutes of him and a great deal of nonsense around it.