Sofia Carson

Watch Evie in Descendants (2015) when she is not the one talking. Kenny Ortega's made-for-television musical gives the Evil Queen's daughter a prince to catch and not much else, and Sofia Carson plays her as a girl who has been told what to want since birth and is starting, without a line to say so, to doubt it. It is a supporting part in a bright, thin film, and she finds more in it than the script gives her. We did not expect to be watching the villain's daughter in the background of other people's numbers, and we were, because Carson had decided Evie was thinking about something.

The part made her, and she stayed with it through two sequels (2017, 2019), alongside Dove Cameron, before the turn that has shaped the rest of the career. From 2020 she moved to a run of leading roles in films made for streaming: Feel the Beat (2020), a dance comedy that let the training she had from the age of three show; Purple Hearts (2022), a romance in which she plays Cassie Salazar, a musician, and on which she also served as executive producer and contributed to the soundtrack; then Carry-On (2024), a thriller opposite Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman, The Life List (2025) and My Oxford Year (2025), which she produced as well. She runs a music career in parallel, with a debut album in 2022. The pattern is plain: ambitious, well-dressed young women, usually in love, often singing, and increasingly in films where she has a hand in the choosing.

What works is what worked in 2015. She is a trained dancer and a proper singer, and when a film lets her perform inside a scene rather than stopping for a number, the singing and the acting are the same thing. The other side is what some reviews of the romances keep returning to: the storytelling is called formulaic and sentimental, with Carson carrying material lighter than she is, and Purple Hearts, made with Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, who has directed her twice, drew a divided response for how it handled the gap between its two lovers. We have not reviewed those films and will not judge them here. We will say the complaint is familiar to anyone who watched her as Evie: the actor is doing more than the part.

She has said that "Not taking the pop star route has felt natural to me. I find such joy and fulfillment from storytelling through film." What makes that interesting is that she is now in a position to act on it. A producer chooses the story. The next thing worth watching is whether Sofia Carson the producer gives Sofia Carson the actor a part she does not have to rescue.