Jack Haven

In I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Jack Haven sits on the bleachers of a football field and talks, in something close to a single take, for what feels like a long time. We will not say what Maddy is talking about. What we can say is that Haven does not soften it, does not look for our sympathy and does not hurry, and that the scene is both the best-written thing in Jane Schoenbrun's film and the passage that most tests your patience. We shifted in our seats and then stopped, because it became clear that the stillness was the performance and Haven was not going to hand us anything easier. That is their trade: the outsider who has stopped blinking.

Haven has been acting since the age of 11, and the early film credits are the usual small change: a part in Irrational Man (2015), supporting work in Downsizing and The Glass Castle (both 2017). The turn came the same year with Casey Gardner in Atypical (2017–2021), four seasons as a bisexual sibling whose growing up the series had time to follow. Around it came studio work, Action Point (2018), Bombshell (2019) and Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020), where they played Billie Logan opposite Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. None of it prepared anyone for Maddy.

What Haven does well is the guarded teenager, played with physical and vocal choices that change across a film rather than staying put. In I Saw the TV Glow they are all edges and long stares next to Justice Smith's hunched, half-whispering Owen, and the flat, monotone affect of the early scenes gives way to something far less inhibited by the end. They have said of the script that "there was so much dread and anxiety in her relationship with reality," and that is what they play: not a message but a person who cannot get comfortable in the world. The surreal material stays believable because Haven keeps the teenage behaviour recognisable underneath it.

The reservations are about the record rather than the work. We have one film to go on, and one scene in it that we admired. The parts have run to a pattern, queer or questioning young people on the outside of their families, and it is fair to ask whether that is a lane or a limit. The move from being known on television to carrying films is one plenty of actors have failed to make, and it is not made yet. The sidelines, an improvised vocal band called Subtle Pride and an art publication, Waif Magazine, suggest a taste for the odd end of things, which is not always where the work is.

Schoenbrun is the collaborator who matters. Haven's second film with them, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026), puts them behind a mask as Little Death, the slasher, which is a long way from the bleachers and perhaps the right distance. We would watch them in anything Schoenbrun makes. We would like to see whether anyone else can find the same thing in them.