Tom Felton

Tom Felton was a child actor out of Surrey, working in commercials, and he had two features behind him, The Borrowers and Anna and the King, before he was cast as Draco Malfoy. That part ran across eight films and a decade, which means the audience watched him grow up in character, in real time, inside one of the largest film franchises ever made.

What he got right about Draco is worth stating plainly, because it is a specific acting choice rather than lucky casting. On the page the character is a sneering bully. Felton played the fear underneath it: a boy performing cruelty because the alternative is admitting he is out of his depth, and visibly worse at the performance every year. By Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the sneer has gone entirely and what remains is a frightened teenager doing something appalling because his family requires it, which is the best acting in that film by a distance.

Since then he has not found a role of comparable size, and he does not appear to have chased one very hard. Rise of the Planet of the Apes handed him another cruelty to play, more thinly written. The rest has been mid-budget films and television: period pieces in Belle and A United Kingdom, a run on The Flash, a lead in the American series Murder in the First. It is a modest, varied working career, which is a considerably better outcome than most child stars of that magnitude manage.