Finn Little

Finn Little was fifteen years old when Those Who Wish Me Dead opened in May 2021, and the performance he delivered opposite Angelina Jolie announced something the industry couldn't ignore. Directed by Taylor Sheridan — working here in full thriller mode, far from the slow-burn Wyoming of Yellowstone — the film drops Little's character Connor Casserly into a Montana wilderness with assassins behind him and a traumatized smokejumper as his only protection. What's striking is how Little never plays the kid-in-peril angle for sympathy. He's reactive, frightened in ways that feel physical rather than performed, and he holds the frame against Jolie without straining for it. That kind of instinct, at that age, doesn't come from coaching alone. It's something closer to temperament.

Born in Brisbane, Queensland, on June 9, 2006, Little was still in primary school when he started picking up Australian television work. The path from there to a Taylor Sheridan production is faster than it sounds, but it wasn't random. Australian child actors who break through internationally tend to do so through one defining project that travels — and Those Who Wish Me Dead was that project for Little. The film earned modest theatrical returns against a reported $34 million budget, but it found a much wider audience on HBO Max simultaneously, which meant Little's work reached viewers who might never have sought out a mid-budget action thriller in a cinema. Streaming did the distribution work that box office couldn't.

The thing nobody mentions is how physically demanding the role actually was. Sheridan shot on location in Montana and Georgia, and the film's third act puts Little through extended sequences involving fire, water, and rough terrain — not the kind of material you can finesse in post. His co-star Jolie noted in press at the time that Little had done significant preparation, and it shows in the way the survival sequences feel grounded rather than staged. Jon Bernthal and Aiden Gillen are also in the film as the hired killers, and Little's scenes opposite Bernthal carry a specific tension, the kind where you can't tell if the adult in the room is a threat or not, which is exactly what Sheridan's script needs from that relationship.

Hard to say if the awards circuit was ever really in play for a genre film like this one. Little didn't receive major individual nominations for Those Who Wish Me Dead, though the film was well-reviewed enough that his name circulated in conversations about young performers to watch coming out of that year's release slate. Australian industry recognition for younger performers can be inconsistent, and there's no confirmed award win to cite here. That's fine. The film speaks for itself as a credential.

Looking ahead, Little's trajectory after Those Who Wish Me Dead points toward a performer who won't be locked into the child-actor pipeline for long. He was fourteen when principal photography on the Sheridan film would have taken place (production wrapped before the 2021 release), and he's now in his late teens, which puts him at the threshold where the roles available shift considerably. Projects confirmed or in development beyond the Sheridan film haven't been widely detailed in trade coverage as of this writing, but the pipeline from a high-profile streaming debut — especially one on a platform with HBO Max's reach — tends to generate options quickly. The Australian screen industry has a strong track record of holding onto talent at this stage rather than losing it entirely to Los Angeles, though the demands of international production make that balance difficult to maintain. Whatever comes next, Those Who Wish Me Dead established the baseline: a young actor who can carry weight in a scene without asking the audience to carry him.