Madeleine Yuna Voyles

Alphie is solemn, curious and only just learning what a lie is. In Gareth Edwards' The Creator (2023), Voyles makes those qualities enough to hold our attention when the story cannot. Playing an AI child gives her an obvious task: make us care about someone the film asks us to regard as different. She does it without losing the sense that Alphie is still working out how people behave.

John David Washington's Joshua is so emotionally closed that his gradual opening-up offers little to watch. Voyles gives Edwards the more expressive half of their pairing, although hers is hardly a showy performance. We were moved by her seriousness as Alphie, because she makes the child's effort to understand dishonesty feel more important than the machinery around her. It is a performance worth separating from our reservations about the film, which builds a convincing future and then relies on a familiar story.

This was her feature debut, secured through an open worldwide casting call. Her subsequent work includes Adeline in the coming-of-age short Tall Tales (2026) and voice work in the series Gold Land (2026). Our view rests on Alphie, rather than on assumptions about what those credits might prove. It establishes how well she can hold our interest in a central role, while leaving open the question of what she might do with a character less dependent on innocence.

Edwards gives her a world that feels inhabited, but the writing does not give her enough that is unexpected. There is a risk in treating a solemn child as a ready-made source of feeling, though Voyles's curiosity keeps Alphie from becoming only that. We would like to see her given a part that allows for more mischief and less responsibility for making an entire fictional world matter. See The Creator for Voyles, with modest expectations of the plot.