David Dorfman, the Boy From The Ring Who Traded Hollywood for Harvard Law

For a few years, when an American film needed a child who seemed to understand more than the adults around him, the part went to David Dorfman. In The Ring he was Aidan Keller, the quiet, unnervingly composed boy who watches the cursed videotape and ends the film helping his mother copy it, asking what will happen to whoever sees it next. In Panic he was the grandson an old hit man was patiently training for the family trade. Then, at the height of that demand, he did something child actors rarely manage on their own terms. He stopped, and built a second life that has nothing to do with the screen.

Dorfman is a Los Angeles native, and he had screen credits by the age of five. Television came first, with the television film Invisible Child and then the part of young Rupert Holt in Family Law, the CBS legal drama created by Paul Haggis and Anne Kenney, where he was billed in a cast led by Kathleen Quinlan. It was steady work, the kind that teaches a child to hit marks and wait between setups. The roles that defined him were still a couple of years away.

Two films released in 2000 showed what casting directors saw in him. In Don Roos’s Bounce he played Joey Janello, the younger son of the family Gwyneth Paltrow’s character is left to hold together after a plane crash, a small figure at the edge of a romance with Ben Affleck. Panic, Henry Bromell’s crime drama that premiered at Sundance, gave him something stranger. He was Sammy, the son of William H. Macy’s reluctant contract killer, and the boy turns out to be the hinge of the whole plot: when Macy’s character discovers that his own father, played by Donald Sutherland, has been grooming Sammy as the next assassin, he finally turns on the old man.

The Ring changed the scale. Gore Verbinski’s remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film, written by Ehren Kruger, put Dorfman alongside Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson and Brian Cox as Aidan, the eight-year-old son of Watts’s journalist. Its success led Hollywood to remake The Grudge and Dark Water in the years that followed, and the child at its center was part of the design. The performance works because Aidan almost never behaves like a frightened child. He is calm, and the calm is the threat.

The industry decided quickly what he was for. In 2003 he played the young Dan Dark in Keith Gordon’s The Singing Detective, from Dennis Potter’s script, with Robert Downey Jr. as the grown man. In Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre he was Jedidiah, the Hewitt boy who disagrees with what his family does and leads its victims out of the house while Leatherface is distracted. The same year brought Charles Wallace Murry, the uncanny gifted child of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel, in the ABC television film A Wrinkle in Time directed by John Kent Harrison, a performance that earned him a nomination at the Young Artist Awards.

The Ring Two arrived in 2005 with Hideo Nakata, the director of the Japanese original, behind the camera. It moved mother and son from Seattle to Astoria and made Aidan the target rather than the witness: the dead girl Samara wants his body. Critics were far colder to the sequel than to the first film, and the material asked Dorfman to play a boy hollowed out from within, a heavier assignment than the stillness that had made his name.

This is where the usual telling of his story gets too neat. The “where are they now” lists that circulate around The Ring present Dorfman as a child star who escaped, as if acting had been a trap he slipped out of. The record is less dramatic. He kept working after the sequel, with an episode of Ghost Whisperer, a supporting part as Emmit opposite Owen Wilson in Steven Brill’s Drillbit Taylor in 2008, his last feature film, and six episodes of the horror-comedy series Zombie Roadkill with Thomas Haden Church in 2010. Nor has the screen been erased from his professional biography. His fellow profile at the National Endowment for Democracy still says that before law school he was “an award-winning Hollywood actor.” The documented honor is a Young Artist nomination rather than a win, so the line reaches past the record, but it sits in a résumé built for policy work, which suggests the films are counted as experience rather than hidden.

What the lists get right is the speed of the second act. Born on February 7, 1993, Dorfman was admitted to UCLA at 13, in 2006, while he was still taking roles, and graduated in 2011 as valedictorian. Business Insider, which in 2013 counted him among the most impressive students at Harvard Law School, noted that he had been admitted there at 18. The NED profile records a perfect grade point average at UCLA and a Harvard law degree with high honors, which made him one of the school’s youngest graduates.

The legal career that followed runs through federal institutions. According to that profile, he worked at the Justice Department, including its National Security Division and a U.S. Attorney’s Office as a Harvard fellow, and spent time at the Motion Picture Association of America drafting international film tax credit programs, the one point where his two lives touched. He practiced law for the Senate Judiciary Committee, worked as an attorney for a global law firm in Hong Kong, and served as chief counsel on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee covering Asia, the Pacific and nonproliferation. The most recent post in the public record, which Wikipedia still listed as current in 2022, is legislative director and general counsel in the House of Representatives, working for the vice chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

There is no announced return to acting, and nothing in his public record points to one. The result is that two David Dorfmans now exist side by side: a lawyer in his thirties who works in rooms where nobody connects him with horror, and an eight-year-old who, every time someone presses play on The Ring, finishes copying the tape and asks what happens next.

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Tags: actors, Naomi Watts, The Ring, David Dorfman, Gore Verbinski, The Ring Two

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