Despite playing the lead role in one of the most successful drama series in the world, Freddie Highmore manages to keep his personal life mostly off the radar.
The British actor, who has been previously linked with Dakota Fanning, Abigail Breslin and Sarah Bolger, puts it down to living and working in Vancouver – and not Los Angeles – for the past few years.
Both his current series, The Good Doctor, in which he plays autistic savant and surgical resident Dr Shaun Murphy, and his previous show, Bates Motel, have filmed in the Canadian city.
Despite playing a lead role in both shows, he has managed to squeeze in some dating.
“I still feel like there’s time for that,” he tells New Idea. “It’s all about having an awareness of how you want to live your life at the same time as making the most of all these exciting opportunities that are being presented to you.
“It could quickly become very lonely if you were living in Vancouver on your own for eight months of the year without seeing anyone else. The cast are great but you want to have those other experiences too, so yeah, there’s time for that and it’s in a quieter way in Vancouver.”
Acting since the age of seven, Freddie came to widespread attention as a 12-year-old in the film Finding Neverland. Now 26, he has grown up on-screen – going from that cute little kid who stole scenes from Johnny Depp to a star in his own right.
While he spent his teenage and early adult years in the public eye, Freddie has avoided the pitfalls encountered by so many other former child stars. Once again, he thinks it’s the fact he wasn’t based in LA which allowed him to navigate that tricky time without incident.
“I think it was living in London and growing up in an environment that was somewhat separate from Hollywood and that world, where it would have been hard to define myself as something other than an actor,” he says. “I feel a certain distance from that world. I’m not on Instagram or Twitter or any of those things. And I could go to school and high school, then I went off to university and kind of gave up acting for two or three years while I studied.”
Helping to keep him grounded was the fact that the people around him didn’t let his fame go to his head, especially when he started studying Arabic and Spanish at Cambridge University when he was 18.
“I don’t think they would have allowed me [to leverage my fame],” he says. “They’d have just kicked me out of Cambridge and said, ‘Go and do that if that’s what you want to do.’ No, it was very normal as a university experience and I didn’t act when I was there.”
