Jake Abel
Jake Abel is an actor, born 1987.
Abel has spent his career one step to the left of the lead. He arrived in the young-adult adaptation boom and worked most of it: Luke Castellan in both Percy Jackson films, Mark James in I Am Number Four, Ian O'Shea in The Host. Those parts run on a specific quality, an open American handsomeness that a script can turn in either direction, and directors kept turning it.
The best thing he has done is the biggest departure. In Love and Mercy he plays Mike Love, the bandmate who thinks the ambitious new record is a mistake, and the performance refuses the easy version where the man is simply an obstacle. He plays him as someone genuinely worried, which is much harder and much more useful to the film.
On television he had a long side career as Adam Milligan on Supernatural, a half-brother who exists mostly to complicate other people's mythology, and a season as a lead on the Netflix science fiction series Another Life. Since then the work has been steady rather than starry: horror in Malignant, drone-war drama in Good Kill, a run on Walker, small parts in Dirty John and Medal of Honor.
Movies (18)
- Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)
- The Lovely Bones (2009)
- I Am Number Four (2011)
- Malignant (2021)
- Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)
- The Host (2013)
- Love & Mercy (2015)
- Against the Sun (2014)
- An Affair to Die For (2019)
- Almost Friends (2017)
- Flash of Genius (2008)
- Good Kill (2015)
- Fog of War (2025)
- Strange Wilderness (2008)
- Go Figure (2005)
- Angel of Death (2009)
- Son of the South (2021)
- Shrimp (2018)
TV (6)
Where to start with Jake Abel
Love & Mercy first. It is the only film here that asks him to play a real person with an unsympathetic position and to make the position make sense, and he does.
If you came for the franchise material, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is the better of the two Percy Jackson films and gives him the most to work with as the older camper who teaches the hero to fight. The Host is a curious one, a science fiction romance where he is one half of a very strange love triangle, and it is more interesting than its reputation.
Supernatural is the long-form option, though his appearances are scattered across many years. Malignant is the loudest thing on his resume and he is good in the early stretch. Good Kill and Another Life are the two that show him working outside the type.