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Child actors have been stealing scenes and hearts at least since Jackie Coogan teamed with Charlie Chaplin in the 1921 weepy The Kid. For three years in the '30s, Shirley Temple was Hollywood's biggest box-office star; she was just 6 when the Motion Picture Academy voted her a special Oscar. Since then, the Academy has honored 16 actors under 14 with nominations or Oscars. Keisha Castle-Hughes, 14, the Maori charmer of Whale Rider, was cited last year. Tatum O'Neal (Paper Moon) and Anna Paquin (The Piano) won supporting-actress Oscars on their first acting jobs. Standards change, and what was cute in the '30s can seem forced today. "I watched a Shirley Temple film the other night," says Trevor Albert, one of the producers of Winn-Dixie, "and I thought, 'God, was she an over-actor.'"
Different media have different demands too. The kid market is big business on TV, with full-time factories like Nickelodeon, ABC Family and the Disney Channel churning out moppet entertainment. Nickelodeon has 14 scouts traveling the country trying to find the next young stars. But the show-biz sass that works on sitcoms may look grotesque on the big screen. Those reflexes anticipate what a director wants, when maybe what he wants is to be surprised. "You don't want some actor child who does everything perfectly and doesn't have a childlike aura," says Campbell Scott, who directed the then 13-year-old Valentina de Angelis in Off the Map, opening next week. "They have to be professional enough to not want to go home after three hours but unprofessional enough so they can be completely wild--so they'll go for it."
Is this technique sandbox or Stanislavsky? "Children are natural Method actors," says Emily Mortimer, who is McElhone's mother in Frankie. "It's because there are no tricks at their disposal. The only thing they can do is what they do in life: to play and use their imaginations." The boy plays Frankie into a fully realized character, preternaturally alert to the emotions swirling around him.
Agents and directors look for unaffected kids with the gift of not minding being looked at. "I only respond to natural, and then what I do is enhance," says agent Meredith Fine, who represents Haley Joel Osment (an Oscar nominee for The Sixth Sense) and the Breslin siblings Spencer (The Cat in the Hat) and Abigail (Signs). "They have to have some innate ability. It's like, if you're going to take ice-skating lessons, you have to have good balance or you're going to be on the ice a lot."
Des Hamilton, the casting director who found McElhone in a school search for a boy to play Tilda Swinton's son in Young Adam and then recommended him for Dear Frankie, also prefers nonprofessionals. "When you're casting a kid, you want a kid to be a kid. It's nice for them to come onto the set wide-eyed and wondering what's going to happen next. You know they won't try to be anything other than what they are."