Taylor John Smith
Taylor John Smith is an actor, born 1995.
Casting directors keep asking Taylor John Smith to do the same difficult thing, which is to be entirely open and entirely suspicious at once. He was born in Los Angeles in 1995 and worked up through the usual ladder: a teenage boy in Insidious: Chapter 3, a son in the American remake of Martyrs, a supporting part in Wolves, a lead in the thriller You Get Me.
Sharp Objects is where the case for him gets made. As John Keene he is the grieving brother in a town that has already decided what it thinks of him, and the series uses his openness as an unsettling quality rather than a reassuring one. The performance works because he never plays defensive.
Since then he has split his time between military pictures and literary adaptations, which is a strange division of labor. He was Lt. Andrew Bundermann in The Outpost, Belford in Hunter Killer, Walter Quaid in Shadow in the Cloud and Frank in Warfare. On the other side he was Tate Walker in Where the Crawdads Sing, by a distance the largest audience he has had. The through-line is a certain earnestness that most young American actors train out of themselves, and directors keep finding uses for it.
Movies (15)
- Lucky Strike (2026)
- Warfare (2025)
- A Haunted House 2 (2014)
- Hunter Killer (2018)
- Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)
- The Outpost (2020)
- Where the Crawdads Sing (2022)
- Blacklight (2022)
- Shadow in the Cloud (2021)
- You Get Me (2017)
- Some Kind of Beautiful (2015)
- Martyrs (2015)
- Depravity (2024)
- Almost Friends (2017)
- Wolves (2016)
TV (2)
Where to start with Taylor John Smith
Sharp Objects is where the case for him gets made, so start there, with the caveat that you are entering a series in which he is a supporting player inside somebody else's unraveling. His scenes are the ones where the show lets its guard down, and he is very good at seeming like the only honest person in a town of liars.
Where the Crawdads Sing is the popular one and the softest use of him: a straightforwardly decent romantic lead in a bestseller adaptation. If that is your speed, it is the easiest watch on the list.
The military films are the better acting. The Outpost is a well-made combat picture and his part in it is the most disciplined thing he has done, while Warfare covers similar ground with more formal rigor. Shadow in the Cloud is the odd one out, a wildly uneven B-movie that is fun in stretches, and Hunter Killer is the popcorn option.