Ariana Greenblatt

Ariana Greenblatt was born on August 27, 2007, in New York, and she's been working in front of cameras since she was barely old enough to read a call sheet. Most audiences first clocked her through her Disney Channel work — specifically her recurring role on Stuck in the Middle — but it's her film career that's defined the trajectory people are now paying attention to. She's one of those performers who arrived young and didn't waste the runway.

Her early screen presence was built on comedic timing and a kind of physical ease that kids either have or they don't. What's striking is how quickly she moved past the Disney pipeline that tends to trap young performers in a narrow register. By the time she appeared as young Gamora in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), she was working opposite Josh Brolin in a scene that required her to hold genuine menace and fear simultaneously — and she did. That sequence, where Thanos leads a child version of Gamora through a massacre she can't fully comprehend, asked something real from her, and she delivered it without overselling. For a performer still in her early teens, that's not nothing. Hard to say if the industry fully registered it at the time, but in retrospect it reads as the moment her ceiling got raised.

She's shown a consistent pull toward genre material — science fiction, action, projects that place her in physically demanding or conceptually high-stakes environments. That's not accidental. Young performers who can credibly exist inside big-budget genre worlds don't grow on trees, and Greenblatt has built a reputation for being technically present in those spaces rather than just decorative. Her collaborators have skewed toward directors working with scale: large productions, effects-heavy environments, stories where the physical and emotional registers have to coexist without one drowning the other.

The clearest recent example of that is 65 (2023), the science fiction survival film written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, in which Greenblatt stars opposite Adam Driver. The film drops two crash survivors — Driver's pilot and Greenblatt's Koa, a young girl who doesn't share his language — onto a prehistoric Earth crawling with dinosaurs. It's a stripped-down premise, almost a two-hander, and the weight of the film rests on whether you believe their bond across a language barrier. Greenblatt carries most of that emotional freight without dialogue to lean on (a choice that would terrify most adult actors, let alone a teenager). Variety reported that the film underperformed at the box office relative to its budget, but the performances drew consistent notice. In 65, Greenblatt proves she's not just capable of holding her own against a performer of Driver's caliber — she's actively shaping scenes alongside him.

She's seventeen now (as of this writing), which means the industry is at one of those inflection points with her: does she transition cleanly into adult roles, or does the awkward middle ground slow things down? I'd bet on clean. The range she's shown — comedy on television, franchise work in the MCU, a near-silent survival performance in 65 — suggests someone building deliberately rather than just taking what comes. The next few years will tell us whether the ambition matches the opportunity, but the foundation is already more varied than most performers her age can claim.