Chloe Moretz: A Good Child Star

I normally hate child actors, especially the prolific ones. Every time I saw a preview with 9-year-old Dakota Fanning I rolled my eyes. Spencer Breslin in his day was painful to look at and his sister Abigail was not in anything good outside of Little Miss Sunshine. Freddie Highmore of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was acceptable but did he have to be in everything back then?

But now there’s finally a kid actor worth liking and her name is Chloe Moretz. Playing the smart kid sister to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in (500) Days of Summer, she instantly jumped out as being more than just an annoying little girl. She’s mature and she’s actually funny; she has good comedic timing. She’s also about to explode onto the scene in next month’s highly anticipated Kick-Ass.

Her first big film of 2010 is Friday’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Then April’s Kick-Ass. After that she’s starring in Let Me In, the American remake of the hit Swedish vampire film. If that’s not good enough of a reputation, she’s just been cast in Martin Scorsese’s next film, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Playing the purple-haired Hit Girl in Kick-Ass will get her the big attention. More positive reviews of the film have come out of South by Southwest this past week, so if the film performs to the same level at the box office, a lot of people are going to be familiar with her. There’s a hilarious red band clip of the film online with her in a vest learning to take bullets from her dad (Nic Cage) and that’s in addition to the trailer bits of her seeming to be the most competent of all the self-appointed crime fighters in the movie.

I’ve got to give credit to her agent for recognizing her unique gift with comedy and staying away from dumb roles like Dakota Fanning took in a number of stupid romantic comedies. One of Moretz’s first films was playing one of the kids in the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror. The tamest it gets for this girl is voicing a character on a number of Disney’s Pooh shows a few years back.

How Moretz was handled as a child actor should be the gold standard. Her mom has to be awesome, I think there’s no denying that. I’m sure plenty of great offers have come around to star with Kristen Bell or someone in some upcoming sisters-separated-by-age-that-love/hate-each-other comedy, but Chloe and her family or her agent said “no.” That’s awesome.

The best part? She’s already 13 which means we won’t see her as a kid actor forever. She’ll have a much easier time being taken seriously when she starts to look her age in a few years and get parts that Dakota Fanning was never offered because she was annoying for five years. Of all the child actors out there, I see Chloe having the easiest path to keeping up her career as she goes through her teenage years. Then again she’ll probably fool us and go to school because she’s just that smart and she’ll manage to be full-time and still get good work and we won’t even know it.

Too bad I wasn’t cute enough in my parents’ eyes to warrant them taking me to Hollywood at age six to start landing some gigs. Oh well.