Luke Benward
Luke Benward is an actor, born 1995.
Benward turned up in a Martina McBride video at seven, which tells you what kind of career this was always going to be. Born in Franklin, Tennessee in 1995, he played Stevie Dewberry in Because of Winn-Dixie in 2005 and Billy in How to Eat Fried Worms the year after, both of them the sort of parts child actors get when they can hold a scene without mugging.
Then Disney found him. Charlie Tuttle in Minutemen in 2008, Ryan in Girl vs. Monster in 2012, Will in Cloud 9 in 2014, Dillon in the Pretty Little Liars spin-off Ravenswood, plus a run as Teddy's boyfriend Beau in the fourth and final season of Good Luck Charlie. That is the whole channel playbook, and he was good at the specific thing it required: likability with no edges, delivered at speed.
Getting out of that is the hard part, and the credit that did the most for him is Bo Larson in Dumplin' in 2018, a role that needed him to be the handsome boy without turning into a joke about handsome boys. He played it kindly, which was the right call and not the obvious one.
Since then the work has scattered: Jack Strong in Life of the Party, the thriller Grand Isle in 2019, Playing God in 2021, and, away from the credits listed here, Lloy Danderson on the CMT comedy Still the King.
Movies (13)
TV (5)
Where to start with Luke Benward
Go to Dumplin' first. Bo Larson could easily have been scenery, and Benward plays him with enough patience that the central relationship reads as real rather than as a lesson, which is more than the part strictly asked for.
Working backwards, Because of Winn-Dixie is the best film he has appeared in and the earliest evidence that he could act rather than merely present. Minutemen and Cloud 9 are the Disney Channel at its most Disney Channel, worth an afternoon if you grew up on them and nothing at all if you did not.
Dear John gives him a small, serious job inside a big weepie, Life of the Party uses him for comic warmth, and Grand Isle is the swerve into low-budget thriller territory. Start with the first of these, jump to the last if the Disney years are already familiar.