Kelly Reno was never an actor, which is the point. In The Black Stallion Carroll Ballard put a ranch boy alone with a horse and filmed what he did; those scenes remain the measure for how a person and an animal share a frame.
Fi1m perspective
The boy is kneeling on sand, trying to catch a fish, and not catching it. Later he is kicked. Later still he lights a fire, and Carroll Ballard's camera simply watches him do it. This is the whole of Kelly Reno's method in The Black Stallion (1979), and it is not a method at all. He was thirteen, he could ride, and Ballard filmed him doing things rather than performing them, so none of it reads as a performance.
That is rarer than it sounds. Most children on screen are either coached into charm or coached out of it, and you can see the coaching either way. Reno came from a cattle ranch in Pueblo, Colorado, was found at an open audition for riders and had never acted; he did most of his own riding and action, including going into black water after the horse in the shipwreck that opens the film. Caleb Deschanel shoots that sequence tilting and firelit, Robert Dalva cuts it fast, and then on the island the cutting almost stops and Carmine Coppola's flute and drum give way to surf and the horse breathing. Reno has to hold all that quiet, and he does, by not trying to. "I wasn’t trying to be an actor. For me it was a day off from school, so why not?" he said years later, and it is the best account of the island we know. We find those scenes harder to watch dry-eyed than most films built to make us cry, and it is because Reno never once looks at us for sympathy; he is too busy with the fish.
Then Mickey Rooney arrives and the film becomes a racing picture, good and ordinary, and Reno becomes a good, ordinary child actor in it. He went back for The Black Stallion Returns (1983), with Teri Garr again as his mother and the horse stolen away to Morocco; by common account it is a plainer picture, and the stillness that had looked like truth on the island was read there as a poker face. There was a young Hungarian horseman, Miki, in Pál Gábor's Brady's Escape (1983), and a boy out of time in an episode of Amazing Stories (1985). Then the acting stopped. He went back to ranching, later drove trucks, and turned up for small parts in No Man's Law (2021) and Monster Grizzly (2023).
There is no case to make for Kelly Reno as an actor, and we are not going to make one. What there is, is one film in which a director understood that the right boy on the right horse, left alone, would give him something no acting could, and had the nerve to leave him alone. Watch the first hour of The Black Stallion, and watch the boy rather than the horse.
Biography
Kelly Reno is an American actor, rancher and trucker. Born on 19 June 1966 in Pueblo, Colorado, he grew up on a cattle ranch and had ridden horses since early childhood.
At the age of 13 he was cast, after an open audition, as Alec Ramsey in the 1979 film The Black Stallion, directed by Carroll Ballard and co-starring Mickey Rooney and Teri Garr. He reprised the role in the 1983 sequel The Black Stallion Returns and appeared in the 1985 Amazing Stories episode "Alamo Jobe".
Reno graduated from high school in 1984. His acting career ended after he sustained severe injuries in a road accident involving a semi-truck. He later worked as a cattle rancher and certified truck driver.
