20-year-old Ellar Coltrane has been in the acting business since he was seven, but his first big film only came out last year. What gives? Has he just been wasting all of that? Well no, he has a pretty decent in that for those thirteen years he was working on one huge project: Richard Linklater's Boyhood, a staggering achievement in filmmaking that followed a character from childhood to college, aging in semi-real-time. Every year from 2002 to 2013, Linklater would pick back up with Coltrane and the rest of the cast, filming a little more and thus watching them age appropriately. He surrounded the younger cast with the seasoned likes of Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette for this domestic drama, and lucked out when Coltrane grew up into a genuinely good actor. A good actor who has proven that he can play a character who is by turns intense, goofy, funny, angsty and wise-cracking. Whether he can step up to the action scenes in a Spider-Man film? Not a clue, since the most action-packed Boyhood gets is some dive-bombing into rock pools. But he's even closer to the comic book Peter Parker than Andrew Garfield: dorkier, taller, even more gangly. More perfect?
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
