A Madeleine McGraw early adopter

Just as a baseball scout takes eternal pride in a player whose potential they noticed very early on, who went on to great things, I am taking pride in my "discovery" of Madeleine McGraw.

The 13-year-old actress, who stars in The Black Phone (which I finally saw last night), is also one of the supporting characters on a Disney+ TV show we watch with the kids called Secrets of Sulphur Springs. She plays the younger sister of the main character.

And damned if I didn't say, from her first moment on screen, that she's got "it."

Now that I've written enough text to clear the space taken up by the Black Phone movie poster, I'll show you who I'm talking about in a still from that movie:

This picture does not, of course, do justice to her charisma, her spunk, and her astonishing acting chops, but if you saw the movie, you probably already experienced them for yourself.

In the TV show, she's a ten-year-old with an attitude, who acts circles around many of the other actors, some of whom are really not ready for primetime. She brings that attitude to The Black Phone, where she has several scenes in which she hilariously drops f-bombs, and one of tearing a couple detectives a new one. But it's not just sassiness she excels at, as there's a scene where her father (Jeremy Davies) beats her mercilessly with a belt, and the tears she summons are total and overwhelming.

I actually thought of writing this post when I first saw the trailers for The Black Phone, but I never did. After finishing it -- and really liking it -- I knew it was time.

Except ...

Except there is not a straight line between Secrets of Sulphur Springs and The Black Phone, or in any case, the former is not the start of that line. As I was singing her praises to a friend on messenger, he said "Isn't she also in Ant-Man?" And by that I suspected he meant Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Indeed, McGraw plays the young version of Evangeline Lilly's the Wasp. I suspect she's only in one scene as it took me about 30 cast members on IMDB to get to her, but I certainly would have seen Ant-Man and the Wasp before I first saw Secrets of Sulphur Springs. So perhaps my overwhelming sense of her star power was more a recognition that I had seen her somewhere before.

Not only once actually, but more than once. 

McGraw is also in Pacific Rim: Uprising and American Sniper, though I don't suspect either of those would have been places I remembered seeing her. 

It's not just on screen roles where she has "it," though, either. People seem to think very highly of her voice, which I get, as it's a bit raspy. She also does vocal work in Cars 3, Toy Story 4 and Mitchells vs. the Machines.

Okay so everybody thinks she's awesome, not just me.

I still want to go on record with a prediction, though, which is that five years from now, she'll be one of the biggest stars we have going. Of course, no one ever really knows how a child actor will transition into an adult actor, whether it will be the relatively smooth sailing of someone like Chloe Grace Moretz, or whether it will involve a long and possibly permanent period of trainwrecking, someone like Lindsay Lohan. 

But the thing about McGraw is that she seems to have the intelligence to make the transition, the natural instinct for how to do this, that certain something.

And because the internet has a way of permanently hanging on to things, I can look back on this post in October of 2027 to see how I did. 

You may not have heard it here first -- or maybe you did -- but Madeleine McGraw is one to watch for.