Abby Ryder Fortson: Marvel Aged Out Her Cassie Lang, Netflix Made Her Velma

Abby Ryder Fortson

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 14, 2008 Burbank, California, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp, A Dog's Journey
Awards	Astra Film Awards Star on the Rise Award, Hollywood Creative Alliance

Marvel replaced Cassie Lang twice. When the Avengers saga jumped forward five years, the girl who had played Paul Rudd‘s daughter in two Ant-Man films became a teenager played by someone else, and when Cassie came back as a lead she was someone else again. Abby Ryder Fortson, the actress who had created the part, was left with a question most child actors meet later and less publicly: what happens when the character keeps growing and the studio decides you are not the one who grows with her.

Her response has been to grow up in rooms the franchise was not watching, in parts that ask more of her than Cassie ever did. Netflix is now handing her one of the most recognizable teenagers in American animation: Velma Dinkley, the girl who is always right before anyone believes her.

The daughter of actress Christie Lynn Smith and John Fortson, she was born in Burbank, California, in March 2008, and was working in television before most children learn to read. After a guest spot on The Mindy Project, she learned how adult dramas use children from the inside: as Ella Novak in Amazon’s Transparent, as Harper Weil in ABC’s The Whispers, and across ten episodes of HBO’s Togetherness as Sophie Pierson, the daughter of the strained couple played by Mark Duplass and Melanie Lynskey.

Peyton Reed‘s Ant-Man, in 2015, gave her the role most of the world still attaches to her face. Cassie is the reason Scott Lang wants to be a better man, and Fortson played her without the precocious polish that usually comes with a superhero’s child. She returned for Ant-Man and the Wasp in 2018. Then the timeline did what timelines do to young actors. Avengers: Endgame, in 2019, aged Cassie into a teenager played by Emma Fuhrmann, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, in 2023, recast her again with Kathryn Newton. The second change drew loud complaints from fans, and Marvel offered little public explanation.

The turn came from Judy Blume. Kelly Fremon Craig, who had written and directed The Edge of Seventeen, cast Fortson as the lead of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., the first screen version of a novel Blume had refused to sell for almost half a century. Fortson plays an 11-year-old who moves from New York City to the New Jersey suburbs and starts negotiating directly with God about the body changing under her and a religion her parents never chose for her. Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates surround her; the film rests on her. Time called her marvelous. She was nominated for the Critics’ Choice award for best young actor or actress, which went to Dominic Sessa for The Holdovers, and in January 2024 the Hollywood Creative Alliance gave her its Star on the Rise Award at the Astra ceremony.

The reviews tell only half of it. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. scored 99 percent positive among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, opened third at the North American box office and finished with about $21.5 million worldwide against a $30 million budget. The best lead performance of Fortson’s childhood reached far fewer people than her supporting scenes in a Marvel sequel,, in a theatrical market that no longer knows where to put a mid-budget studio film about a girl’s first year of puberty. For the actress, the order of things may have been lucky. The industry read her as a serious performer before the public read her as a star, which is the reverse of how the recast had framed her.

The roles since have been chosen like an adult’s. On The Pitt, the HBO Max hospital drama that won the Emmy for best drama series, she played Kristi Wheeler across four episodes of the first season: a pregnant 17-year-old who comes to a Pittsburgh emergency room with her aunt for a medication abortion, only for her mother to arrive and the family to fight over the decision while Kristi locks herself in a bathroom. Arcs like that can reduce a guest actor to a talking point. Fortson played Kristi’s stubbornness straight and never asked the camera for pity. In Nicholas Colia’s Griffin in Summer, which won best U.S. narrative feature at the Tribeca Festival and reached theaters in August 2025, she is Kara, best friend and would-be director of a 14-year-old playwright’s backyard production. Kathryn Newton, the actress who inherited Cassie Lang, is in the same cast.

At Sundance in January 2026 she was back at the center of a grown-up film. Rachel Lambert’s Carousel, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, casts Chris Pine as a divorced doctor in Cleveland and Jenny Slate as the old love who comes back into his life through his daughter’s world; Fortson is Maya, the daughter whose debate ambitions set the story moving. Some reviewers complained that the film drifts toward Maya once the romance has peaked. Read another way, the complaint measures how much weight the third-billed actress was able to carry. No U.S. release date had been announced by October 2026.

The next move is the most public since Marvel. Netflix cast Fortson as Velma in Scooby-Doo: Origins, the franchise’s first live-action series, run by Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg. Mckenna Grace plays Daphne, Tanner Hagen is Shaggy, Maxwell Jenkins is Fred and Paul Walter Hauser plays Scooby’s owner, while the dog himself is a real Great Dane for the first time. The eight episodes follow the four teenagers through a last summer at Camp Ruby-Spears and a supernatural murder that a puppy may have witnessed. Filming ran in Atlanta from April to September 2026. Velma arrives with decades of audience expectation that Cassie Lang never carried, and every viewer has a version of her already in mind. Fortson also has Rated in post-production, a film directed by her father, John Fortson.

Netflix has set Scooby-Doo: Origins for 2027. It will be the first time since Ant-Man that a mass audience meets her before the critics do, and this time the character cannot be aged out from under her: in a story about how Mystery Inc. began, Velma is meant to be a teenager, and so, for a little while longer, is the actress playing her.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Paul Rudd, The Pitt, Ant-Man, Abby Ryder Fortson, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., Kelly Fremon Craig

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Judy Blume Finally Gets the Screen Adaptation She Deserved in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

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