A child actor remembered for one part: the boy in The Ring who calls his mother by her first name and looks at her as if she were the one who needed watching. A short career, mostly in horror, and one performance that has not dated.
Fi1m perspective
Aidan Keller does not call his mother Mum. He calls her Rachel, and he watches her the way a doctor watches a patient who has not yet been told. David Dorfman gives The Ring (2002) its second most unsettling effect, and he does it without raising his voice. Gore Verbinski's film is at its best for about an hour, and a good deal of that hour depends on Dorfman being in the frame and saying very little while Naomi Watts's Rachel, a working single mother who forgets to collect him, fails to notice what he has been drawing.
We found him hard to look at, in the way the film wants. Most children in horror films are asked to scream or to go blank; Dorfman does neither. His Aidan is composed, courteous and slightly disappointed in the adults, and the composure is what frightens, because a boy that calm has plainly decided the grown-ups cannot help. When his teacher hands over a pile of his drawings and Watts understands, before we do, what she has been getting wrong, the scene lands because Dorfman has spent the preceding minutes making that mistake believable. He is not creepy. He is a child who knows more than his mother and is too polite to say so.
The career around that part is short and mostly genre. He had been working since the late 1990s, with a recurring role on Family Law (1999–2002) and early film parts in Panic (2000) and Bounce (2000), before The Ring brought him wider notice. He went back to Aidan for The Ring Two (2005), again opposite Watts, and turned up in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and a television A Wrinkle in Time (2003), where he played Charles Wallace Murry. Drillbit Taylor (2008) followed. His last credit is the 2010 series Zombie Roadkill, after which he stopped acting to concentrate on his education.
The pattern is plain enough: casting directors saw the stillness in The Ring and kept hiring it, chiefly for horror remakes, and a child actor is rarely allowed to be anything other than what he was last time. Whether Dorfman could have grown into something else we will never know, since he chose not to find out. What survives is one performance that has not dated, in a film that has, a little. Watch The Ring for its first hour and keep an eye on the boy; the tape is what everyone remembers, but he is the one who makes the house feel wrong before anything has happened in it.
Biography
David Dorfman is an American actor and attorney. Born on 7 February 1993 in Los Angeles, he began acting as a child and is best known for portraying Aidan Keller in the horror film The Ring (2002) and its sequel The Ring Two (2005).
His other film roles include Sammy in Panic (2000), Joey Janello in Bounce (2000), Jedidiah Hewitt in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), and Emmit in Drillbit Taylor (2008). He also appeared in television series such as Family Law (1999–2002) and Ghost Whisperer (2005), and played Charles Wallace Murry in the television film A Wrinkle in Time (2003). Dorfman retired from acting around 2010.
He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating as valedictorian, and Harvard Law School. As of 2022, he works in the US House of Representatives as Legislative Director and General Counsel.
