Jacob Tremblay, the boy from Room who now plays the Unabomber

Jacob Tremblay

Photo: Gordon Correll / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 5, 2006 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Room, Wonder, Luca
Awards	Critics' Choice · Canadian Screen Award · National Board of Review · Chicago Film Critics Association · Emmy

Being the child everyone remembers comes with a specific problem. For most viewers, Jacob Tremblay is still Jack, the long-haired boy in Room who believed the whole world fit inside a locked shed, or Auggie Pullman hiding behind an astronaut helmet in Wonder. The actor has spent the last two years working against that memory. In Unabomber, now on Netflix, he plays Ted Kaczynski as a Harvard student being quietly broken by the men he trusts, and he has said plainly that he was “really not trying to look charismatic in any way.” The question his career is asking now is whether an audience that watched him grow up will let him become someone else.

Tremblay grew up in the Vancouver area as the middle of three children. His father is a police detective, and both of his sisters, Erica and Emma Tremblay, have worked as actresses; his maternal grandfather is Chilean. He still lives with his family in Langley, British Columbia, and he has kept that home base through every stage of the career that followed.

Television came first. His film debut, a small part in The Smurfs 2, arrived in 2013, when the Vancouver native, born in October 2006, was six. The break came two years later. In Room, Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, he played the five-year-old son of a woman held captive for years, opposite Brie Larson, who went on to win the Oscar for the role. Tremblay turned nine during the film’s press tour. The performance won him the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer and the Canadian Screen Award for best lead actor, handed to him by Christopher Plummer, and it made him the youngest nominee ever in the Screen Actors Guild’s supporting actor category. He did not win it, but the nomination fixed his name in the industry’s mind. His delight at meeting C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8 at that year’s Academy Awards was one of the highlights of that night.

What followed was a run few actors his age get. He appeared in the thrillers Before I Wake and Shut In, in Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry and in Shane Black’s The Predator. The biggest of them was Wonder, the adaptation of R.J. Palacio’s novel in which he played a boy with Treacher Collins syndrome starting school for the first time; it earned more than $285 million worldwide against a budget of about $20 million. In 2019 he led Good Boys, an R-rated comedy with Brady Noon and Keith L. Williams that opened at number one at the North American box office.

The same year produced the scene that changed how directors talked about him. In Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, he appears for only a few minutes as a boy abducted and tortured to death by a cult, a sequence Flanagan has said he feared might be too disturbing to keep in the final cut. It stayed, and Flanagan called Tremblay “one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with in my entire life.” The director brought him back for The Life of Chuck, his Stephen King adaptation, giving him the teenage version of Tom Hiddleston‘s character in the film’s closing minutes.

In parallel, his voice became one of the most employed in family animation. He was the title character in Pixar’s Luca, Elmer in My Father’s Dragon, Flounder in Rob Marshall’s live-action The Little Mermaid and the boy afraid of the night in Orion and the Dark, a role that earned him a Children’s and Family Emmy for outstanding younger voice performer. On television he has voiced Damian Wayne, the youngest Robin, in the adult animated series Harley Quinn, and the lead in the preschool series Pete the Cat.

That double track is also where the story gets less tidy. Through his teenage years the voice work kept him a child on screen at exactly the age when a live-action actor usually steps back to grow up, which kept him visible but extended the image he is now trying to leave. And the adult turn has been running ahead of the material it has been given. Critics praised his performance in Unabomber, with SlashFilm calling him “excellent” and noting he had never played anything so intense, but the film itself collected poor reviews, with critics faulting its split timeline and its FBI subplot. Choosing darkness as proof of adulthood is a route many former child stars have tried, and it only works when the films are strong enough to carry the performance.

The clearest evidence that the shift can work came with Sovereign, Christian Swegal’s drama based on the 2010 police shootings in West Memphis, Arkansas. Tremblay played Joe Kane, a teenager raised by his father, played by Nick Offerman, inside the sovereign-citizen movement. Reviewers singled out the quiet way he showed a boy beginning to doubt what he had been taught, and the role earned him a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for best supporting performance. He has described that film and Unabomber, made close together, as the pair that put him “in a good spot as a dramatic actor.”

He was cast in Unabomber in June 2025 and shot it that month in Montreal under Danish director Janus Metz Pedersen. Russell Crowe plays Henry Murray, the Harvard psychologist whose experiments the young Kaczynski took part in, and Shailene Woodley plays a fictional FBI agent working the case decades later. Tremblay has said he used his own admiration for Crowe to play a student in awe of his professor. Netflix released the film on September 25, 2026, days before his twentieth birthday.

Off screen he keeps a low profile. He is a lifelong Star Wars fan who named his dog Rey, after Daisy Ridley‘s character, and in interviews he is as likely to talk about rock climbing near Vancouver as about Hollywood.

The next month will show both versions of him at once. On October 23, 2026, Laika releases Wildwood in US theaters, Travis Knight’s stop-motion adaptation of Colin Meloy’s novel, in which Tremblay voices Curtis Mehlberg alongside Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Carey Mulligan and Mahershala Ali. Further ahead is The Night House, a horror film that Jo Nesbø adapted from his own novel, directed by Jesper Ganslandt and shot in the Basque province of Álava; Tremblay plays the young Richard and Aaron Paul the adult one. One film keeps the boy’s voice working, the other asks him to hand the character over to a grown man, and the space between the two is where his career is now being decided.