Child star Freddie Highmore’s career received a huge boost when he starred opposite Johnny Depp in a pair of films. “Finding Neverland” was released in late 2004, and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” hit theaters eight months later, in 2005. Suddenly, it felt like Highmore was everywhere, but the young star didn’t feel any different from his peers. “I’m a normal kid, really,” he shared on “Live With Regis and Kelly.” It’s a refrain Highmore would repeat again and again in interviews throughout his career, insisting that despite his movie-star fame, he’s just a regular guy. “With acting, you can’t be too self-conscious,” he told HuffPost about filming his first on-screen gay kiss. “You shouldn’t care about what people are thinking about you at the time because they’re not caring about you, they’re caring about the character.”
Highmore’s career has taken him from being Johnny Depp’s pint-sized co-star on the big screen to the television airwaves, as the actor spent the past decade on “Bates Motel” and “The Good Doctor,” a pair of highly successful shows. Still, you may be feeling nostalgic, so we’re taking a look back at Highmore’s transformation throughout the years.
He’s been acting since he was tiny
Freddie Highmore was born in 1992 on Valentine’s Day, and he’s been acting for almost his entire life. He told Oprah Winfrey that he started performing when he was five. “When I was younger, I thought it would be quite fun to do a small part and see how it went,” he recalled. “So I went to an audition, and I did a small part, and then the parts got bigger and bigger.” He started his career in a TV movie called “Walking on the Moon,” though his part was ultimately cut. “Women Talking Dirty” followed, as did parts in “Happy Birthday Shakespeare” and a mini-series about King Arthur called “The Mists of Avalon.” Highmore’s father, Edward Highmore, was an actor, too. In 2001, Freddie appeared alongside his dad in the mini-series “Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story.”
Many years later, speaking with fellow child star Dakota Fanning for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Freddie reflected on what it was like to grow up on set. Initially, he said, he didn’t see acting as something he had to do for the rest of his life. “It didn’t feel like a job. It wasn’t this profession … It wasn’t something that my parents said, ‘This is what you’re gonna be forever.’” Little did young Freddie Highmore know that his career would go on to span decades.
He was childhood friends with another kid actor
When he was younger, Freddie Highmore was more well-connected than your typical child actor. His mother was a talent agent, and while her client list included her son, it also boasted another famous face: “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe. “He’s a few years older than me, but our families have known each other for ages, not just through acting,” Highmore told The Independent. “Even before Dan and I had done our first film, we were playing together on the beach.”
A shrewd businesswoman, Highmore’s mother once tried to upsell director Ron Hardy on having both her son and her other famous client in his movie “December Boys.” Hardy told Moviehole, “[Radcliffe] wasn’t my first choice, but only because I didn’t think we had a chance — but I agreed to let her pass the script onto [Radcliffe’s] parents. They then passed it on to him. Within 48 hours there was a response back saying ‘they all love it!”” Ultimately, Highmore dropped out of the film, but Radcliffe remained.
While the childhood friends never wound up working together, they were later reunited. A photo posted to Tumblr shows Highmore and Radcliffe posing with Highmore’s “Bates Motel” co-star Vera Farmiga at the 2014 installment of the iconic San Diego Comic-Con, where all three actors were promoting projects.
