(Ben Cope)
If you saw Nisha Ganatra’s Freakier Friday in theaters last weekend, you might have been wondering who the young actress playing the angsty teenage daughter this time around is. Unlike her on screen mother, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters isn’t a global movie star like LiLo was when Mark Waters’ Freaky Friday (2003) was released. Then again, it’s hard to find many big stars under the age of 18 these days in cinema, at least at the level Lindsay, Hilary Duff or Raven-Symoné were in the 2000s. For Julia, this might actually work in her favor. Not only because she seemingly gets to be a teenager without paparazzi and reporters bothering her, but because she actually grew up in Los Angeles and has family who work in the film industry too. Her father, Darrin Butters, is apparently a major animator for Walt Disney Studios and has had jobs on movies including Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee’s Frozen (2013), Jared Bush, Byron Howard & Rich Moore’s Zootopia (2016) and Ron Clements & John Musker’s Moana (2016). Julia is lowkey one of the more recent ‘nepo babies’ to hit Hollywood, meaning she probably hasn’t felt pressure to be a child star like kids with typical stage parents do. In fact, her resume doesn’t even feature many family friendly projects and she was usually cast as the token cute kid while starting out.
(Andrew Cooper / Sony Pictures)
At age 5, Julia’s first on-screen credit was as the title character of the 2014 episode ‘Gabby’ of CBS’ “Criminal Minds” and her first theatrical feature was Michael Bay’s 13 Hours (2016). Recurring roles on Amazon’s sitcom “Transparent” (2015-16) and ABC’s dramedy “American Housewife” (2016-2020) followed, but I don’t think anyone was expecting the biggest scene-stealer of Quentin Tarantino’s retro pastiche Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) to be a tiny 9-year-old girl. Many actors would feel intimidated performing opposite modern legends like Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, but little Julia completely sold her one very memorable sequence in OUaTiH as the precocious co-star of Leo’s character while he’s working a TV gig. Julia’s scene-stealing rep carried over to the popular comedy sketch ‘Tammy Craps’ on Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave” in 2021 and in Anthony & Joe Russo’s schlocky action flick The Gray Man (2022). The same year as the latter, Julia collaborated with her second auteur director, Steven Spielberg, with The Fabelmans, where she played a fictionalized portrayal of one of the filmmaker’s sisters. Now with Freakier Friday added to her filmography, we’ll see if Julia wants to continue acting fulltime as an adult in the near future, as Jodie Foster, Saoirse Ronan and the Fanning sisters have; or abandon the craft for a completely different career, like Shirley Temple, Quinn Cummings and the Olsen twins did. Personally, I think Julia has enough talent and charm to follow in the footsteps of fellow showbiz kids Dakota Johnson and Margaret Qualley if she has a strong support system and well-meaning team around her. But because she’s still so young, she has all the time she wants to decide too.
