Freddie Highmore

Alfred Thomas Highmore had a film career before he had a driving licence. He was twelve when Finding Neverland cast him as Peter Llewelyn Davies, the grieving boy who hands J. M. Barrie his story, and the performance was quiet enough to hold the middle of a film built entirely around adults. A year later he was Charlie Bucket, the one uncomplicatedly decent person in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and two consecutive Critics' Choice awards for Best Young Performer followed.

What Highmore does is withhold. Most child performers push; he plays the pause before the line. That is why the watchful parts suited him best: the orphan with perfect pitch in August Rush, the twin brothers of The Spiderwick Chronicles, whom he played as two genuinely different people, the voice of a robot boy who does not know what he is in Astro Boy. The three Arthur and the Invisibles films used him as a straightforward adventure lead and are the weakest stretch on his record.

The transition that ends most child careers, he made in a single jump. Bates Motel ran from 2013 to 2017 and asked him to play Norman Bates as a sweet, frightened teenager; the stillness that had read as gentleness in the family films turned out to be very good at hiding something, and it brought three Critics' Choice television nominations. Since 2017 he has produced and starred in The Good Doctor as Dr. Shaun Murphy, a network medical drama that made him a far bigger star than the films ever did and earned him a Golden Globe nomination.