Dylan O'Brien

O'Brien's career got its real footing on television. Teen Wolf, the MTV supernatural drama that ran from 2011 to 2017, gave him six years as Stiles Stilinski — a role that built him a genuinely devoted fanbase and proved he could carry long-form character work across multiple seasons. That's not nothing. Television is where a lot of film actors quietly learn how to be consistent on camera, and O'Brien used that time well. The film side kicked into gear with the Maze Runner trilogy. The first installment arrived in 2014, and the franchise ran through 2018 — three films, all with O'Brien as the lead, all operating at major studio scale. Around the same time, he was taking on other projects that showed he wasn't just a franchise placeholder: he played Caleb Holloway, an actual survivor of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, in the 2016 disaster film directed by Peter Berg, and then Mitch Rapp, a fictional counterterrorism operative, in American Assassin (2017). Two very different registers — one grounded in real tragedy, one a straight action thriller — back to back. Bumblebee (2018) is the one I keep coming back to when thinking about his range. He voiced the title character in that Transformers spinoff (Wikipedia), which required a different kind of performance discipline than live-action leading-man work. Love and Monsters (2020) followed — a post-apocalyptic adventure that let him lead a smaller, more emotionally focused film without a franchise safety net underneath it. Then Caddo Lake in 2024 moved him into horror territory. The through-line across all of it is an actor who doesn't want to be defined by a single genre or tone, which is either a smart long-game strategy or just the natural result of saying yes to whatever genuinely interests him. Probably both.