Nick Robinson

The risk of the Ohio forests

Nick Robinson was born in Seattle and was already working on a television series for ABC Family before turning fifteen. He was 2010, and the project was called Melissa & Joey.

That job gave him unusual financial stability for a teenager. But his mind was elsewhere. He wanted auteur cinema and sought characters with more edges than those in a sitcom filmed with a laugh track.

In 2013, he filmed The Kings of Summer. It was a small movie shot in the forests of Ohio that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. There, critics saw something different. He wasn't the typical cereal-commercial pretty boy.

And that was the key to his rise.

Jordan Vogt-Roberts' script demanded a naturalness that Robinson nailed from the first rehearsal. That's because the actor has a weary gaze that fits well with characters who keep a cynical distance from their parents.

In 2015, he made a massive leap into mainstream blockbuster films with Jurassic World. He played the older brother who just stares at his phone while dinosaurs devour the people around him. The film grossed $1,670 million. Robinson cashed his check and went back to independent projects without wasting any time.

The teen idol label

Greg Berlanti called him in 2018 to star in Love, Simon. It was the first major Hollywood studio production centered entirely on a gay teen romance. The pressure was enormous given the political weight of its release.

Robinson is not gay in real life, and that sparked online debates about representation in film. However, his performance was restrained (he avoided the usual theatrics of the genre), and critics ended up praising his subtlety.

The project performed well at the box office.

For 2019, he decided to move away from high school roles. He appeared in Native Son and in the series A Teacher in 2020. In the latter, he played a student seduced by his teacher. It was an uncomfortable role that aimed to break his image as the perfect boy for teen magazines.

The industry took notice.

Production and gritty realism

In 2021, he appeared in Maid for Netflix. He played Sean, an alcoholic and abusive man. The striking physical transformation took him far away from romantic comedies for good. The series amassed 469 million viewing hours in its first month on air.

Robinson began taking an interest in what happened behind the cameras. So he started producing his own projects to have control over the stories. He was more interested in the technical process than the red carpet.

In 2024, he premiered Snack Shack. It's a comedy set in the nineties in which he plays a young entrepreneur at a public pool. The film recovers the rowdy tone of his early days but with a far more mature technical execution.

Also in 2024, he filmed Turn Me On alongside Bel Powley. It's a dystopian story where emotions are outlawed and citizens must medicate themselves to feel nothing. Filming for his next project is scheduled for late 2025 in locations across Eastern Europe.

The total budget of his latest independent production did not exceed $15 million.