Lucas Hedges

Lucas Hedges was born in Brooklyn in 1996, is the son of the filmmaker Peter Hedges, and studied theatre at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He appeared on screen as a child in Dan in Real Life, then took a supporting role in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom in 2012, which is the credit that got him seen.

His breakthrough was Patrick Chandler in Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea in 2016, and it earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The performance is worth being specific about, because the reason it works is that he plays grief as irritation. Patrick's father has just gone and what surfaces is annoyance about schedules, band practice and the freezer, which is exactly how a sixteen-year-old processes a catastrophe and almost never how films depict it.

That opened a remarkable three-year run: Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017, then mid90s, Boy Erased and Ben Is Back in 2018, with Waves and Honey Boy following in 2019. He was very good in most of them and slightly interchangeable across a few, which is the risk of being the go-to sensitive young man of a given season.

Since then he has worked at a slower pace and in odder company: Let Them All Talk, French Exit, the biographical drama Shirley, and Sorry, Baby in 2025. The pattern suggests an actor deliberately stepping away from the leading-man track, and the smaller, stranger parts have generally suited him better than the ones that asked him to carry a film alone.