Max Charles
Max Charles is an actor, born 2003.
A resume like this one is what a working child actor's decade actually looks like from the inside. Max Charles was on screen from 2011, in Spooky Buddies and the Disney Junior series Minnie's Bow-Toons, and by 2012 he had two very different jobs at once: Peezer in The Three Stooges and the four-year-old Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man, a role he returned to for the 2014 sequel.
The voice work is where the volume is. He was Sherman in DreamWorks' Mr. Peabody & Sherman in 2014 and again in the follow-up television series, Kion across The Lion Guard and its films, the title role in Nickelodeon's Harvey Beaks, Bobby Bird in The Angry Birds Movie, and Buddy G in a Scooby-Doo feature. It is a lot of leading-man responsibility for animation, and the parts are all built on the same warm, slightly anxious delivery.
The live-action side went somewhere stranger. He took over Zach Goodweather on The Strain from season two onward, replacing Ben Hyland, which meant spending three seasons of a bleak vampire drama as the child everybody is trying to protect. He also played Spin on Lab Rats, Max Weaver on the ABC comedy The Neighbors, and Alby in the small post-apocalyptic film The Last Survivors.
Two full careers, animation lead and live-action kid, run side by side through the 2010s here.
Movies (12)
- The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
- The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
- The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
- Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014)
- Scooby-Doo! Shaggy's Showdown (2017)
- The Three Stooges (2012)
- The Last Survivors (2014)
- The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar (2016)
- Spooky Buddies (2011)
- Northpole (2014)
- The Lion Guard: The Rise of Scar (2017)
- Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas (2014)
TV (8)
Where to start with Max Charles
Mr. Peabody & Sherman is the right first stop. It is the only thing on this list built entirely around his voice, and the whole film depends on Sherman reading as a real, slightly put-upon child rather than a cartoon one.
After that, split by mood. The Lion Guard is the long-form version of the same skill, a Disney Junior lead role sustained across a series and its films, and the closest thing here to a signature. The Strain is the outlier and the more interesting watch: a child actor handed a grim horror serial from season two onward, holding a role somebody else originated.
The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 are two brief appearances rather than a performance. Harvey Beaks and The Angry Birds Movie round out the voice side if you want more of it.