Asa Butterfieldgot a very early start in this industry, gaining a good deal of notoriety with one of his very first credits, the award-winningThe Boy in the Striped Pajamas. His career hasn’t lost an ounce of momentum since and it’s propelled him forward to his very first lead role in a series - and some of his best work in my opinion - playing Otis Milburn in Netflix’sSex Education.
As you’ll hear me say in this edition ofCollider Connected, I can’t imagine having the drive and professionalism to churn out next-level work in feature films at such a young age. As Butterfield explained, it all began as fun and simply being a kid tapping into his imagination, but things began to change when the opportunity to work withMartin ScorseseonHugocame his way:
“I remember auditioning for that and every time I told someone I was auditioning for it and said, ‘Oh yeah, Martin Scorsese’s directing it,’ they were like, ‘Oh my god!’ And as a 12-year-old at the time, I had no real scope as to what that was and kind of the importance of that. Because I liked watching sci-fi action movies andTheLord of the Rings, cartoons.”
Butterfield ledHugoas the title character, Hugo Cabret, a 12-year-old boy living in the walls of a train station in Paris in the 1930s. He’s responsible for maintaining the station’s clocks, but what really interests Hugo is the automaton and notebook left to him by his late father. That production included a number of Academy Award winners and nominees like Scorsese, screenwriterJohn Logan, cinematographerRobert Richardson, production designerDante Ferretti, and then some. Butterfield essentially walked on a set packed to the brim with the best of the best.
“It wasn’t until a bit later on, around about when I didHugo, that I started kind of looking a bit more into the future, and not only that, but also [gained] a wider scope of acting and filmmaking as a whole, and my appreciation of cinema. All of the bits that go into [working] not just as an actor, but the sound and music, the cinematogprahy, and set design, which onHugowere, as you could imagine, a 13-year-old stepping into that set with some of the most legendary filmmakers, set designers, DoPs, just kind of blew my little mind and so from that moment onwards, I think is when I was really captured.”
Butterfield also took a moment to highlight Scorsese’s influence specifically, and the time he took to introduce the young star to all of the possibilities in this industry and the history behind it:
“One of my biggest takeaways from that, the thing I really value that I got from Marty was just an appreciation of history of film and cinema, and that’s one of the core themes of the movie. And so Marty would often talk to me about films that inspired him and he’d give me films to watch over the weekend that we would then talk about, and it really kind of captured my imagination and influenced me to appreciate everything that went on in filmmaking."
If you’d like to hear more about Butterfield’s experience working as a young actor, how each project influenced his goals, how he dealt with bumps in the road like losing the role of Spider-Man and why the timing ofSex Educationcouldn’t have been better, check out his full episode of Collider Connected at the top of this article!
