Robbie Amell has spent more than a decade as the pleasant, square-jawed lead of science-fiction and superhero television, and he is easy company. Asked to carry part of a film, as in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, he has stood beside it and frowned.
Fi1m perspective
In Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) Robbie Amell plays Chris Redfield, brother to Kaya Scodelario's Claire, and for most of the film he frowns at her. She has come back to a town she spent years running from and is not pleased about it; he stands nearby and disapproves. We scored the film 47 and thought the cast better than the script deserved, and the frown is the clearest example of what we meant. We kept waiting for it to turn into something, an argument or a joke, and when it did not we stopped watching him and watched her.
That is unfair to him and not entirely wrong. Amell has been working since he was six, in commercials alongside his sister, and he came up through the teen end of the trade: Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (2005), Life with Derek, True Jackson, VP, and then The DUFF (2015), where he was the good-looking one in a high-school comedy. Television found him a steadier home. He was the lead of The Tomorrow People (2013–2014) and then Ronnie Raymond, otherwise Firestorm, in The Flash (2014–2017, returning in 2022), and since then he has rarely been far from a superpower or a video game.
The job that defines him is Upload (2020–2025), five years as Nathan Brown in a science-fiction comedy. We have not reviewed it, so we will not judge it at length, but the notices are consistent: he is at his best with other actors, the ease between him and his co-stars is what people remember, and one review called the performance passive and then conceded that the character was written that way. The third series gave him more than one part to play, and that was noticed too. Meanwhile he has started making his own work, producing Code 8 (2019), expanded from a short, with his cousin Stephen Amell for the director Jeff Chan, and returning for Code 8: Part II (2024).
The pattern is plain. Amell is a reactor. Put him beside someone with a strong line and he listens well, looks handsome and hands the scene back improved; this is a real skill and television runs on it. Film asks for something else, a man who makes things happen when nobody is feeding him, and in Raccoon City Johannes Roberts had two games to shoot and no time to find out whether Amell could do that. We still do not know.
Which may be why he has taken to producing. An actor whom other people keep casting to stand beside the lead has one sure way of getting a better part, and that is to build the film himself.
Biography
Robbie Amell, also credited as Robert Patrick Amell IV, is a Canadian-American actor and producer. Born on 21 April 1988 in Toronto, Ontario, he began modelling and acting in commercials as a child and trained at the Canadian Studios Acting Academy.
He is known for his roles as Ronnie Raymond / Firestorm in the television series The Flash (2014–2017, 2022), Nathan Brown in Upload (2020–2025), and Stephen Jameson in The Tomorrow People (2013–2014). His film credits include Wesley Rush in The DUFF (2015), Max in The Babysitter (2017), Connor Reed in Code 8 (2019), and Chris Redfield in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021). Amell is the cousin of actor Stephen Amell and is married to actress Italia Ricci.
