Logan Lerman

Lerman was in commercials as a toddler and on a network drama at twelve, which is usually the opening of a cautionary tale. Jack and Bobby gave him a lead as a child. The Butterfly Effect and The Patriot used him as somebody's younger self. 3:10 to Yuma made him the son who has to watch his father fail, and he was good in all of them, which is rarer than it sounds.

Percy Jackson was the franchise attempt and it did not take. Two films, an audience that had read the books and noticed every change, and a leading man who was never the swaggering hero the marketing promised. The Three Musketeers the following year had the same problem. What Lerman actually does well is interiority: a boy thinking hard and saying almost nothing, whose face reports the delay.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) is where that finally met a script built for it. Fury (2014) is the other one and the tougher watch, a typist shoved into a tank crew, with Lerman playing the erosion of an ordinary decency in real time while four louder actors work around him. Indignation (2016) is the third, a chamber piece resting almost entirely on one long argument in a dean's office.

He has been selective since, which reads as taste or caution depending on the week: Bullet Train for the paycheque, Shirley for the arthouse, and two television series about Jewish survival and reprisal in Hunters and We Were the Lucky Ones. He is in his thirties with no franchise attached, which may well be the plan.