The transition from child actor to adult actor can’t be easy. Hollywood is littered with famous kids who couldn’t quite navigate the treacherous world of stardom and ended up broke or worse. Fortunately, Sophia Lillis, 21, has been making the transition nicely. She said she still has trouble shaking that kid image, though.
Lillis went all in with IndieWire and explained that no matter how hard she tries, it’s just really hard to shake that perception everyone has of her. It’s not for lack of trying, either.
Recently, she’s appeared in the hit movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves as well as a turn in Asteroid City as Shelly Borden, although she plays a child in that so that probably doesn’t help.
She’s also had parts in Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, Gretel & Hansel, and the underrated Netflix show I Am Not Okay With This. Her breakout role, however, was the remake of Stephen King’s It, where she played the lovable center of the Losers, a role she reprised in the sequel.
Her latest project is a family drama perhaps ironically titled The Adults. In the movie, she (shockingly) plays the youngest sibling. It doesn’t help that she also looks incredibly young for her age – something she’s acutely aware of.
“Yeah, and I still look 15 in some ways. If you do a project when you are a kid in this industry, you’re going to always be known as a kid, no matter what you do.”
She’s aware that it helps to look younger, and let’s be honest there’s nothing Hollywood values more than youth, but she said she’s still in the “process between being a ‘child actress’ and being just an actress. Take the child part out of there. It’s like, when does that become the other?”
It’s also tougher to audition, she said. A child actor is competing for roles with other children. An adult actor competes “against everyone.”
“Everyone is going for this role, 25-year-olds, 30-year-olds to 16-year-olds and stuff like that. It just gets wider and a little bit more complicated, and so it is tough to try to go into the older category and try to establish yourself as an actress and not as a ‘child actress.'”
Her role in The Adults, she said, helped with that whole process because she was playing her own age. She explained that “even though” her character is “technically more or less an adult, she’s still in the process of learning.”
Sounds like she knows what she’s doing. The Adults is scheduled for release on August 18 and also stars Michael Cera.