Peyton Elizabeth Lee, the Andi Mack actress who carries Laika’s Wildwood

Peyton Elizabeth Lee

Photo: Andrewtinpolee / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 22, 2004 New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Wildwood, Secret Society of Second-Born Royals, Prom Pact

“I’m not buying it. I don’t want any part of your fairy tale.” Prue McKeel says it early in Wildwood, before a murder of crows carries her baby brother into the forest at the edge of Portland, and the voice saying it belongs to Peyton Elizabeth Lee. For Laika, the Oregon studio that still builds its films by hand, she was a pointed choice. Lee spent her teens as one of Disney’s steadiest leads, a girl at the centre of a family secret on Disney Channel and a teenage surgeon on Disney+, and she arrives at the studio’s darkest film, a puppet epic about grief and war, carrying very little of the noise that usually follows a child star.

That absence of noise is the thread. Terri Minsky, the creator of Lizzie McGuire, said she liked that Lee did not look as if she had fallen off a child-star assembly line when she cast her as the lead of Andi Mack. Disney kept handing her the same kind of girl afterwards: clever, a little guarded, slightly out of step with the people around her. Laika wanted that girl too, and then asked her to walk into a forest where the violence includes a beheading and prisoners shot in cages.

Her childhood belongs to Manhattan Beach, the California beach town where the family settled after she was born in New York City on May 22, 2004, and where she started acting at ten. She is half Chinese on her father’s side, and her mother’s family is of English, Irish and Italian descent; she has called her father one of the major reasons she became an actor. Before Disney found her she played small parts in Shameless and Scandal.

Andi Mack premiered on Disney Channel in April 2017, when Lee was twelve, and it opened on a twist most family shows would have saved for a finale: on her thirteenth birthday, Andi learns that Bex, the young woman she believed was her sister, is her mother. The series ran for three seasons and 57 episodes and was, for a stretch, the top-rated show on American cable among children aged six to fourteen. It also made network history through Cyrus Goodman, Andi’s best friend, played by Joshua Rush, the first gay main character on Disney Channel. Lee was the still point in the middle of all that, a lead who listened more than she performed.

Disney kept her close. She voiced Rani, a lioness, in nine episodes of The Lion Guard, then led Secret Society of Second-Born Royals, Anna Mastro’s superhero film for Disney+, as Princess Sam, a rebellious royal who discovers she has powers; the role earned her a nomination at the Critics Choice Super Awards. In January 2021 she was announced as the lead of Doogie Kameāloha, M.D., Kourtney Kang’s gender-flipped reboot of Doogie Howser, M.D., playing Lahela, a sixteen-year-old Native Hawaiian prodigy juggling a medical career with being a teenager. The show was shot in Hawaii, cast Jason Scott Lee as her father and ran for two seasons on Disney+ before it was cancelled.

Doogie Kameāloha, M.D. is also where the ordinary-girl image met its limit. Lahela is Native Hawaiian. Lee is not, and the producers were criticised for giving the title role to an actor without that heritage. She did not wave the objection away. Speaking to NBC News when the series premiered, she described herself as a proponent of people being able to tell their own stories and said “that criticism is valid,” adding that she had worked to get “a better, broader, more authentic understanding” of growing up in Hawaii. It was a frank answer from a seventeen-year-old fronting a studio show. It did not end the argument. The casting decision belonged to the people who built the series; Lee was the one left to answer for it in public.

Then she went to college. By 2023 Lee was a freshman at Columbia University, and she had skipped her own prom to shoot Prom Pact, Anya Adams’s Disney Channel romantic comedy, in which she plays Mandy Yang, a senior so fixed on getting into Harvard that she ends up tutoring the school’s basketball star, opposite Milo Manheim as her best friend Ben. The work since has drifted away from the Disney Channel brand, if not from Disney’s streaming shelves. In Carved, Justin Harding’s Hulu horror-comedy released for Halloween 2024, she leads the staff of a historic pioneer-village attraction trying to survive a killer pumpkin on Halloween night in 1993. In Pizza Movie, Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney’s comedy that premiered at SXSW in March 2026 and reached Hulu in April, she plays Ashley, one of a group of college students whose walk downstairs to collect a delivery turns into a drugged odyssey. Neither film was built to change anyone’s mind about her. They let her be scared, rude and ridiculous, registers a Disney lead seldom gets to try.

Wildwood is a bet of a different size. Laika announced her casting in August 2022, alongside Jacob Tremblay as Curtis, the classmate with a crush who follows Prue into the Impassable Wilderness, and an adult cast that includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina and Richard E. Grant. Travis Knight directed it from Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s novel; it runs 132 minutes and is the studio’s first film rated PG-13 in the United States. The film’s weight rests on whether a puppet can make an audience believe a girl would follow her brother into that forest, and the reviews credit the voice. The Associated Press called Prue “nicely voiced.” Flickering Myth, reviewing the BFI London Film Festival premiere, wrote that she “feels real and relatable, imbued with empathy towards everyone, including Carey Mulligan’s grief-stricken villain.”

The praise has a ceiling, and it is not hers. The same AP review argued that the film’s world-building outpaces its story, and the box office has been more cautious than the critics: Wildwood opened in American cinemas on October 23, 2026, through Fathom Entertainment and took about $12.2 million in its first North American weekend, third place, against a reported $100 million budget, while holding a 99 per cent positive score from 148 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Lee’s next work is already on the books. She is in the cast of Brian, Will Ropp’s film starring Ben Wang, which premiered at SXSW in March and has been touring the autumn festivals, and of Dirty Towel, Callie Carpinteri’s drama about a high-school senior and her mother in the weeks before graduation, now in post-production. Meloy has said that adapting his two sequel novels depends on how this first film lands with audiences. If Laika makes them, Prue McKeel becomes the role that outlasts Andi Mack.

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Travis Knight’s Wildwood makes Laika’s handmade fairy tale longer, darker and PG-13

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