Matt O'Leary
O'Leary started as a child on the Disney Channel, in the television film Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire, and was almost immediately handed something much heavier: Danny Morrison in Domestic Disturbance, the son at the centre of the plot, playing opposite John Travolta.
The two roles worth seeking out are both from that early stretch. As Young Fenton in Frailty he carries a film whose entire effect depends on a child's face processing what his father is calmly telling him, and he plays it without a single note of movie-kid precocity. In Brick he is The Brain, a small part with a large structural job, feeding the plot to the hero in a register of complete deadpan boredom that fits the film's stylised world exactly. In between, he was Gary Giggles, the smug rival agent, across Spy Kids 2 and Spy Kids 3-D.
The adult career went sideways into genre, mostly at the budget level where the interesting risks live: Joe Darley in Death Sentence, Garret Bradley in Sorority Row, Clay in Live Free or Die Hard, a hacker in Skyscraper, Finn in the tight low-budget time-loop picture Time Lapse, Henry Fuller on Project Blue Book.
He is described now as a retired actor. The record here does not say why, and there is no point inventing a reason.
Movies (24)
- Bokeh (2017)
- Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
- Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)
- Frailty (2002)
- Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams (2002)
- Havoc (2005)
- The Lone Ranger (2013)
- Skyscraper (2018)
- Death Sentence (2007)
- Welcome to Marwen (2018)
- Brick (2006)
- Sorority Row (2009)
- Pawn Shop Chronicles (2013)
- Eden (2013)
- Domestic Disturbance (2001)
- Mother's Day (2010)
- Time Lapse (2014)
- Solstice (2008)
- Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire (2000)
- Cinema Verite (2011)
- Stung (2015)
- Warm Springs (2005)
- American Son (2008)
- Drones (2013)
TV (3)
Where to start with Matt O'Leary
Frailty first, without question. It is a Texas horror story about a father who tells his two sons that God has given the family work to do, and the film only functions because the boy playing the sceptical son is completely credible, which O'Leary is.
Then Brick, where he gets very little screen time and uses it to establish an entire tone. Domestic Disturbance is the mainstream thriller version of the same skill, a kid nobody in the film wants to listen to. After that the pickings thin out, but Time Lapse is a genuinely clever low-budget science fiction piece built on three people and one device, and Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams is worth a look purely to see how much fun he has being insufferable. Skip most of the later horror unless you are a completist.