Jimmy Bennett

Short description: American actor (born 1996)

Jimmy Bennett
Bennett at the Television Critics Association tour (2010)
Born	James Michael Bennett (1996-02-09) February 9, 1996 Seal Beach, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Actor, musician
Years active	2002–present
Known for	Young James T. Kirk in Star Trek (2009); Daniel Coleman in Orphan (2009); Toe Thompson in Shorts (2009); Michael Lutz in The Amityville Horror (2005); Tommy Smith in Hostage (2005); Roo in Winnie the Pooh titles

Jimmy Bennett (born February 9, 1996) is an American actor and musician who began working professionally as a child performer and sustained a screen career across film, television, and voice acting. Bennett first drew widespread notice for a rapid run of supporting roles in mid-2000s studio features—most prominently as the youngest son in the Harrison Ford thriller Firewall (2006), the shipwrecked Conor James in Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon (2006), and as Michael Lutz in the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror—before taking on larger parts, including the boisterous lead in Robert Rodriguez’s Shorts (2009) and the pivotal prequel portrayal of a teenage James T. Kirk in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek (2009).

Parallel to his live-action work, Jimmy Bennett also developed a notable voice-acting résumé: he voiced Roo in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo (2004) and the Halloween follow-up (2005), and he voiced “Billy (the Lonely Boy)” in Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express (2004). On television he became familiar to network audiences as J.J. Powell—the teenage son whose super-intelligence emerges after a crash—in ABC’s single-season superhero family dramedy No Ordinary Family (2010–2011).

As an adult, Jimmy Bennett transitioned into lower-budget indies and genre films, including the faux-documentary bullying drama A Girl Like Her (2015)—in which he plays Brian Slater—and the Southern action sequel Bad Asses on the Bayou (2015). In 2018, Bennett entered broader mainstream headlines in connection with reporting about Asia Argento; he later issued a public statement through counsel as coverage of the matter and responses from Argento and others unfolded in international media.

This article surveys Jimmy Bennett’s early life, screen trajectory, distinctive roles, voice work, public reception, awards recognition, and a selected filmography.

Early life and background

Jimmy Bennett was born James Michael Bennett in Seal Beach, California, on February 9, 1996. Raised in Orange County, he auditioned from a young age and accumulated commercial work and guest parts before transitioning into studio features. Early television credits include appearances on Strong Medicine (2002), Judging Amy (2003), and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2004), giving the young actor a cross-sectional apprenticeship in network procedural and family drama styles before high-profile film projects arrived.

Bennett’s first widespread screen exposure came with a small but memorable turn in Daddy Day Care (2003), playing the superhero-obsessed “The Flash/Tony,” and an early voice assignment in I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown (2003) as Rerun van Pelt—roles that sketched out both lanes of his early career: bright, energetic live-action child parts and sympathetic, expressive voice work.

Breakthrough in studio features (2004–2007)

Family and voice features

In 2004, Jimmy Bennett’s profile rose with a trio of projects. First, he took over as Roo in Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo, demonstrating an ability to inhabit a legacy character with a kid’s credible spontaneity rather than imitating predecessors. Second, Bennett voiced “Billy (Lonely Boy)” in The Polar Express (2004), a performance that—paired with motion-capture reference work by Peter Scolari—stands out for its distinctive vulnerability and wistfulness. Critics have regularly cited the “Lonely Boy” subplot as one of the film’s emotional anchors.

Thriller and disaster cinema

By 2005–2006, Bennett was appearing in back-to-back major releases. In Hostage (2005), opposite Bruce Willis, he plays Tommy Smith, a younger sibling swept up in a violent home invasion, a part requiring credible panic and resilience; in The Amityville Horror (2005) he portrayed Michael Lutz in the haunted-house redux, sharing scenes with Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George. He followed with Firewall (2006)—a Harrison Ford techno-thriller in which Bennett plays the kidnapped son Andy Stanfield—and Wolfgang Petersen’s nautical disaster remake Poseidon (2006) as Conor James.

While many of these films received mixed or negative reviews, Bennett’s performances won him visibility and award-season mentions targeted to young performers. His name appears across Young Artist Awards ballots of the period, with the ensemble of Shorts later taking a 2010 category win (see below).

Lead turns and franchise linkages (2008–2010)

Indie terrain and character drama

Bennett’s late-2000s slate mixed studio work with American independent cinema. In Trucker (2008), a small-town character study starring Michelle Monaghan and Nathan Fillion, Bennett plays Peter Bonner—the estranged son whose arrival turns a fiercely independent long-haul trucker’s life inside out. The film’s modest scale allowed Bennett to shade vulnerability with stubbornness in a way that child parts in larger entertainments seldom afford.

He also appeared in Diminished Capacity (2008), a light comic drama with Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, and Virginia Madsen, as Dillon—a small role that nonetheless kept the young actor in the orbit of veteran performers and directors.

The Rodriguez duo: Shorts and kid-fantasy adventure

Bennett’s most conspicuous lead of the decade came in Robert Rodriguez’s Shorts: The Adventures of the Wishing Rock (2009), a collage-structured kids-fantasy that casts him as narrator/protagonist Toe Thompson. Promotional stills and contemporary coverage centered on Bennett’s fast-talking, physically playful performance, and the production’s ensemble of young leads won the 2010 Young Artist Award for Best Performance in a Feature Film (Young Ensemble).

Franchise prelude: young James T. Kirk

Also in 2009, J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot staged its now-famous prologue with a rebellious adolescent James T. Kirk stealing a classic convertible and speeding into the Iowa desert—an emblematic sequence that introduced the character’s daredevil streak. Bennett plays the teenage Kirk in this set-piece and in additional prequel moments, creating a bridge between childhood trauma and the swaggering adult incarnation embodied by Chris Pine. Trek reference sites and mainstream outlets have continued to cite Bennett for that contribution when chronicling the franchise’s modern era.

Horror archetype: the brother in Orphan

In Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan (2009), Bennett appears as Daniel Coleman, the older brother to Isabelle Fuhrman’s deceptive title character’s would-be younger sister. The thriller uses Daniel as both comic relief and a cautionary figure, a kid who senses danger slightly ahead of the adults but is dismissed until it’s nearly too late. Contemporary capsule summaries of the film’s ensemble regularly list Bennett alongside Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, and Aryana Engineer.

Television: from guest turns to a series regular

Jimmy Bennett’s television résumé features steady one-offs across procedural and dramedy series—Gilmore Girls, Perception, Murder in the First, Bosch—but the anchor credit is his stint as series regular J.J. Powell on ABC’s No Ordinary Family (2010–2011). As the teenage son who develops super-intelligence after a family plane crash, Bennett had the space to show comic timing, exasperated teen rhythms, and an evolving sense of moral responsibility week over week. Although the show ran a single season, it shored up Bennett’s credibility with primetime audiences and broadened his industry network among producers of genre-adjacent broadcast fare.

Voice acting: Pooh Corner to the North Pole

Beyond Springtime with Roo (2004), Bennett returned to the Hundred Acre Wood as Roo in later 2005 home-video entries and continued family-animation work with The Polar Express. The latter, an early landmark in performance-capture animation, used Bennett’s voice to counterbalance Tom Hanks’s multi-role tour by grounding scenes with a distinctly childlike cadence and hesitation. He also voiced Rerun in two Peanuts specials—I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown (2003) and He’s a Bully, Charlie Brown (2006)—giving him touchpoints in three of American animation’s most familiar universes.

Later film work and adult roles

As Bennett aged out of child-actor assignments, he gravitated toward modestly budgeted thrillers, dramas, and streaming-era genre films that relied on name recognition from ensemble casts. He appeared in A Girl Like Her (2015), a faux-documentary about high-school bullying that was praised in some quarters as a well-intentioned, if uneven, cautionary tale; his character functions as a conscience figure within the film’s mosaic of footage and interviews. The same year he showed up in Bad Asses on the Bayou (2015), joining Danny Trejo and Danny Glover in the third installment of the action-comedy series, again underlining his comfort in ensemble settings that mix earnest stakes with pulpy tone.

Other later-2010s entries include the indie romance-thriller Heartthrob (2017). While these titles generally released with limited marketing and mixed notices, they maintained Bennett’s on-camera presence as he navigated adulthood and industry transition.

Public profile and media coverage

For most of his early career, Jimmy Bennett’s media footprint resembled that of a typical working child actor: press notes and EPK mentions around release windows, local-paper features pegged to family releases, and occasional award-season quotes when a performance or ensemble drew notice. His portrayal of a young James T. Kirk guaranteed enduring pop-culture footnotes, as retrospective features on the Star Trek reboot often re-surface stills and credits that include Bennett.

In August 2018, Bennett was thrust into international headlines when reporting by The New York Times—widely summarized across broadcast and online outlets—stated that Asia Argento had arranged a financial settlement with him after he alleged she sexually assaulted him in California in 2013 when he was 17. Argento issued public denials of a sexual relationship; coverage then expanded when model Rain Dove supplied text messages to police that appeared to contradict those denials, an action Dove later discussed with multiple outlets. Subsequent news cycles tracked consequences in Argento’s professional commitments, including changes at X Factor Italy and festival curation gigs, while Bennett—who had portrayed Argento’s son as a child actor in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004)—issued statements through counsel and in selected interviews.

This period underscored the complexities facing former child actors navigating privacy, public interest, and legal processes in the social-media era. Coverage of the matter often stressed that confirming facts would hinge on law-enforcement review and legal filings.

Acting style and thematic through-lines

Even in early roles, Jimmy Bennett was frequently cast as the emotionally transparent child in peril: the boy whose face carries anxiety and moral intuition in thrillers (Hostage, Firewall) or disaster set-pieces (Poseidon). In family titles he often embodied either the impish narrator (Shorts) or the sensitive friend (A Girl Like Her). As a voice actor, his turns as Roo and Lonely Boy/Billy leverage a naturally higher-pitched timbre that conveys innocence without slipping into caricature, a quality that suited Disney and performance-capture animation contexts.

A consistent through-line is Bennett’s ability to play reaction—fear, awe, suspicion—so that more stoic adult leads can drive plot mechanics; the camera cuts to the child’s eyes at key beats to calibrate audience emotion. That skill translated neatly into No Ordinary Family, where reaction shots to newly discovered abilities anchor scenes between larger comic or action beats.

Awards and recognition

Young Artist Awards: Bennett appears on multiple Young Artist Awards ballots in the mid- to late-2000s. Notably, the young ensemble of Shorts (including Bennett) won Best Performance in a Feature Film – Young Ensemble Cast at the 31st Young Artist Awards (2010).

Published lists and profiles also note nominations around Firewall and other titles; because those ceremonies have varied official documentation by year, journalists often corroborate via festival websites, trade press, or archives that summarize the categories and nominees.

Selected filmography

(The following tables list representative work; dates reflect original U.S. release/air windows.)

Film

Year	Title	Role	Notes
2003	Daddy Day Care	The Flash / Tony	Feature debut.
2004	Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo	Roo (voice)	Direct-to-video.
2004	The Polar Express	Billy "Lonely Boy" (voice)	Performance-capture/animation.
2005	Hostage	Tommy Smith	Thriller.
2005	The Amityville Horror	Michael Lutz	Horror remake.
2006	Firewall	Andy Stanfield	Tech-thriller.
2006	Poseidon	Conor James	Disaster remake.
2007	Evan Almighty	Ryan Baxter	Family sequel.
2008	Trucker	Peter Bonner	Indie drama.
2008	Diminished Capacity	Dillon	Comedy-drama.
2009	Star Trek	James T. Kirk (young)	Reboot prologue role.
2009	Orphan	Daniel "Danny" Coleman	Psychological horror.
2009	Shorts	Toe Thompson	Lead role.
2009	Alabama Moon	Moon Blake	Coming-of-age drama.
2015	A Girl Like Her	Brian Slater	Pseudo-documentary teen drama.
2015	Bad Asses on the Bayou	Ronald	Action sequel.
2017	Heartthrob	Dustin	Thriller/romance.

Television

Year(s)	Series/Special	Role	Notes
2002	Strong Medicine	Guest role	Early TV appearance.
2003	I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown	Rerun van Pelt (voice)	TV special.
2004–2005	Everwood	Sam Feeney	Recurring (3 episodes).
2006	He's a Bully, Charlie Brown	Rerun van Pelt (voice)	TV special.
2010–2011	No Ordinary Family	J.J. Powell	Series regular (20 episodes).
2015	Murder in the First	Alfie Rentman	Multi-episode arc.
2017	Bosch	Mojo	Recurring (4 episodes).

Personal projects and music

Trade profiles frequently mention that Jimmy Bennett plays guitar and has periodically released music, including a 2011 single (“Over Again”) with an accompanying music video. Such creative outlets are common among actors who start young, both as self-expression and as a way to experiment with persona outside the confines of casting.

Industry positioning and legacy

Measured strictly by box-office columns and aggregator scores, the films anchoring Bennett’s child-actor period range widely—from critical duds like The Amityville Horror remake to evergreen holiday rotation for The Polar Express. But ubiquity is its own legacy: for a generation of viewers, “Jimmy Bennett” is a familiar name from DVD shelves, cable line-ups, and streaming tiles that defined mid-2000s family and genre viewing.

More concretely, his youthful Star Trek turn secures Bennett permanent placement in a canonical pop-culture timeline; future franchise retrospectives and documentaries that chart the character’s journey from Iowa boyhood to starship command will likely continue to call back his scenes in Abrams’s 2009 film.

See also

Child actor

List of American film and television actors

External links

• IMDb — Jimmy Bennett
• Rotten Tomatoes — Jimmy Bennett
• Memory Alpha — Jimmy Bennett (Star Trek role)
• TV Guide — Jimmy Bennett profile