Nick Robinson plays young men who are sorry: sorry they lied, sorry they drank, sorry they said nothing. Cast for a decade as the boy you were meant to like, he got interesting when he was asked to be the one you should leave.
Fi1m perspective
In Maid (2021), Sean Boyd never raises a hand. He tends bar, he drinks and he apologises, and he means it every time, which is the trouble. Alex has left him, and the woman who runs the shelter has to explain to her that what she was living with counts as abuse. Alex does not believe it, and for a while we were not sure we did either. Nick Robinson plays Sean soft-faced and plausible, a man who is trying, and Molly Smith Metzler's series is careful never to let him become a monster, because monsters are easy to leave. We caught ourselves hoping he would pull himself together, then felt uneasy about the hoping, and that unease is the performance doing its job.
He got there by a long route through being liked. Seattle children's and regional theatre as a boy, then five years on the sitcom Melissa & Joey (2010–2015), then a first lead in the independent The Kings of Summer (2013) and a supporting part in Jurassic World (2015) that put his face in front of a far larger audience. Through the late 2010s he led young-adult adaptations, most visibly Love, Simon (2018), in which Greg Berlanti cast him as Simon Spier, a closeted teenager in the first major studio film built around a gay teen romance. The habit that runs through all of it is the same: a young man holding something in and letting you see the effort of holding it. He does this with unusual economy, and for a decade it was nearly all anyone asked of him.
A Teacher (2020) and Maid changed the question. The holding-in is still there, but what is being held is worse: not a secret but a temper, a bottle, a failure to be what his daughter needs. He has said that "It was a welcome challenge to play someone who is not that likable", and you can see the relief in the work. Opposite Margaret Qualley he is never the centre of the frame, which suits him; he is at his best when the story belongs to someone else and he is the reason it is hard for her. The limit is the same as the gift. That softness can read as passivity, and a director who gives him nothing to push against will get a pleasant blank.
Since Maid he has turned up in features, Damsel (2024) among them, and we have not yet seen the part that settles what kind of adult actor he is. He has said he likes not doing the same thing twice. We would like to see what he does with a man who is not sorry at all.
Biography
Nick Robinson is an American actor. Born in Seattle, Washington, he began acting in local stage productions as a child, including A Christmas Carol and Mame in 2008. He gained early television experience with a main role as Ryder Scanlon in the sitcom Melissa & Joey (2010–2015).
Robinson made his feature film debut in The Kings of Summer (2013) and appeared in supporting and lead roles in Jurassic World (2015), The 5th Wave (2016), Everything, Everything (2017) and Love, Simon (2018). He played Sean Boyd in the Netflix miniseries Maid (2021). He has also appeared in A Teacher (2020) and later films including Damsel (2024).
