Harley Quinn Smith
Harley Quinn Smith is an actor, born 1999.
The obvious thing is true and worth saying plainly. Her father is Kevin Smith, she has been in his films since she was a toddler, and most of her credits are his: Baby Silent Bob in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a kid in a window in Clerks II, Tracy Colelli in Jersey Girl, then actual roles in Tusk, Yoga Hosers, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Clerks III and The 4:30 Movie.
Which makes the two outside credits the interesting ones, because they are where she can be assessed without the family discount. She plays Froggie in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, one of a group of young women in a film with a very particular idea of menace, and Mallory Higgins across Cruel Summer, a real television part in a series with no connection to her father whatsoever. Both point the same way: she is better at stillness than at the broad comic register the home films keep asking her for.
She is also a musician, playing bass and singing in the punk band The Tenth, and she has done voice work, including Queen Amelia in Masters of the Universe: Revolution.
The career is young and the question in front of it is straightforward. Nepotism gets you the audition; the Cruel Summer work suggests she would survive one she was not given. What she has not yet had is a lead in something serious that nobody in her family produced.
Movies (13)
TV (3)
Where to start with Harley Quinn Smith
The honest place to start is Cruel Summer, because it is the one credit here that tells you something about her as an actor rather than as a Smith. The series is a nasty, well-built teen thriller and she holds her own inside it.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood is the far bigger film and the far smaller part, worth seeing anyway for the sequence she appears in. After that you are into the family filmography, and how much you enjoy it depends entirely on your tolerance for her father's sense of humour. Tusk is the strangest and the best made of them, Yoga Hosers is the one built around her and the hardest to defend, and Clerks III is the most sentimental. Masters of the Universe: Revolution is the voice work, and a useful listen for how different she sounds out of her usual register.