J. Evan Bonifant
J. Evan Bonifant is an actor, born 1985.
His best director came first, which is an awkward way to begin. Bonifant took the lead in Todd Haynes's Dottie Gets Spanked in 1993, alongside small parts on television including One Life to Live, and nothing he did afterwards was as artistically serious as the thing he did at the start.
What came next was the mid-nineties children's-film economy. He played Tum Tum in 3 Ninjas Kick Back, which brought a Young Artist Award nomination in 1994, and then Buster Blues in Blues Brothers 2000, where the ten-year-old character is dropped into a band built entirely for adults. Both are roles that make a child actor briefly very recognisable to other children and more or less invisible to everybody else.
The later work is television: the voice of Sasha in As Told by Ginger, a turn on The Nightmare Room, and then Jerko Phoenix on Wizards of Waverly Place from 2008, including the Wizard School special. It reads as a career that stopped rather than one that declined, which is the ordinary ending for child performers and is not in itself a failure.
Movies (3)
TV (4)
Where to start with J. Evan Bonifant
Blues Brothers 2000 is the one to see, with a caveat: the film is a pale follow-up and the music is the only sustaining reason to sit through it, but Buster is written as the audience's way into the band and Bonifant is not what is wrong with the picture.
3 Ninjas Kick Back is the nostalgia object and it is precisely what a nine-year-old in 1994 wanted it to be, no more and no less. Wizards of Waverly Place and Wizards of Waverly Place: Wizard School give you the grown-up version, playing a rival inside one of Disney Channel's most durable sitcoms.
As Told by Ginger is the best-written thing on the list, a genuinely sharp cartoon about adolescence, though his part in it is small. The Todd Haynes short that started him is not among the credits listed here.