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Monday, July 21, 2025

North Facet native Maxwell Jenkins is one baby actor who has defied the Hollywood odds


At 19, Maxwell Jenkins has already achieved one thing outstanding in Hollywood — he’s nonetheless right here.

The street to grownup stardom is plagued by child actors chewed up and spat out by the movie-making machine. Suppose Corey Feldman and all the child forged of the NBC sitcom, “Diff’lease Strokes.”

Jenkins, a North Facet native now starring alongside Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Nettles and Beth Grant in Blumhouse Tv and Prime Video’s “The Bondsman: Hell and Again,” (streaming April 3 on Prime Video) credit his mother and father with not letting Hollywood warp his childhood.

Maybe finest recognized for enjoying Will Robinson in Netflix’s “Misplaced in Area,” Jenkins was allowed one display screen undertaking a 12 months till he was about 16, he mentioned throughout a latest chat with the Solar-Instances.

“For 5 of these years, it was ‘Misplaced in Area, which I grew up on. That felt like a household. That felt like a village to me,” mentioned Jenkins, who graduated from Lane Tech Faculty Prep Excessive College.

That present, which ran for 3 seasons, was largely shot in British Columbia.

“They actually let me be a child — they let me go snowboarding,” he mentioned of the present that ran from 2018 to 2021.

Jenkins’ life within the highlight truly started a few years earlier than that, when, at age 3, he first carried out with Chicago’s Midnight Circus, which his mother and father based and which incorporates a massive prime and entertainers touring to communities throughout town.

Jenkins nonetheless tries to carry out in a minimum of one circus present yearly — when there’s time, which is in brief provide. He’s balancing life as a scholar majoring in international research at UCLA. He’s additionally on the college’s cheer squad. And he performs in a band in Los Angeles.

And, in fact, he’s selling “The Bondsman,” a present during which Bacon performs a bounty hunter who’s murdered however then is introduced again to life to trace down and retrieve demons who’ve actually escaped from hell. Jenkins performs Bacon’s character’s son within the present, which debuts April 3 on Prime Video.

Jenkins beforehand performed Nicholas Cage’s child in “Arcadian,” a sci-fi horror movie launched final 12 months.

“Nick is unquestionably eccentric and an enormous historical past buff and has one million wild tales which can be actually enjoyable to take heed to,” Jenkins mentioned.

A couple of month shy of his twentieth birthday and 6 toes tall, Jenkins hasn’t grown weary of taking part in “child” roles — particularly when he will get to work with veterans, corresponding to Bacon and Cage, he mentioned.

“They’re unbelievable actors however they’re additionally unbelievable academics …,” Jenkins mentioned. “I don’t thoughts absorbing the information whereas I nonetheless can.”

Music options prominently in “The Bondsman,” and Jenkins performed his mandolin and guitar for the audition.

“There have been instances once I would textual content (Bacon, additionally the present’s government producer) concepts for a mandolin solo over a tune that we play towards the top of the sequence and he was utterly open to it to the purpose the place that solo ended up making it in,” Jenkins mentioned.

A lot of Jenkins’ newer work options the actor in excessive peril, making an attempt to outlive on a post-apocalyptic planet (“Arcadian”) or fleeing an more and more uninhabitable Earth (“Misplaced in Area”).

“I suppose folks like to see me scream and run, battle monsters, wield swords and laser weapons,” Jenkins joked.

In school, Jenkins’ international research professors typically give a “doomsday speech” when discussing the destiny of the planet.

“Perhaps to a fault, I’m an optimist. Perhaps that stems from the characters I’ve performed rising up — they’re these optimists in instances of destruction and social upheaval and apocalypse,” Jenkins mentioned, including “There are too many good folks internationally to allow us to find yourself in a state of affairs like I suppose we’d in ‘Arcadian’ or ‘Misplaced in Area.’”

At an age when many actors are simply, properly, aspiring to make it within the area, Jenkins has greater than a decade beneath his belt and is in a very good place to supply recommendation to others who’re making an attempt to make it in Hollywood.

What would he say to these people?

“Preserve residing a standard life and have pursuits outdoors of the business … as a result of it’s exhausting to play a standard individual for those who’ve by no means been a standard individual,” he mentioned. “That’s my greatest recommendation to younger actors.”

Jenkins doesn’t envision a time when he’s not in present enterprise, however he additionally doesn’t wish to waste what he’s studying in school.

“I’d love to search out that intersection the place my expertise within the movie business can meet my ardour for the social sciences and I believe there are many folks on the market who try this and I’d like to affix them,” he mentioned.



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