Actors wise beyond their years

It’s hard to look at Anna Paquin now and remember her as the speechless 11-year-old accepting the supporting actress Oscar for “The Piano.” What’s less hard to remember this year is what an influence young actors can have in films. There’s no kids’ table this season, as several young performers took on adult-sized roles and themes — dealing with the loss of parents, alcoholism, a national tragedy and basic survival (with such concerns as finding enough food to live on and avoiding becoming an alien’s dinner). Here we talk to four such standout actors.

Thomas Horn, 14

“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”

For any actor to carry a film that delves into the still-raw memories of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would be a heavy load emotionally and a risky prospect commercially. For a teenager to do so raises the stakes considerably, and for a teen acting for the first time, well, that seems almost too much pressure to bear.

But Thomas Horn handles the role of Oskar Schell, a brilliant but troubled child whose father (played by Tom Hanks) has died in the World Trade Center attacks, with assured grace in Stephen Daldry’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

For Horn, who was not yet 5 when the terrorists targeted the U.S., the key to unlocking the depth of the subject matter was a visit to New York’s ground zero.

“I knew what had happened, but it wasn’t emotionally real to me until I did the project,” the San Francisco resident says by phone while on a press tour in New York City. “Then I met with people who had lost relatives, and I went to the World Trade Center site and I got to see some clips from the day. And that really made it real to me. It showed me what happened in a way I could really understand on an emotional level.”

That newfound understanding was what he tapped to play Oskar, who discovers a key among his dad’s belongings and sets out on a quest to find what it unlocks, hoping for a final message from his father and perhaps some meaning he can attach to the tragedy.

“I think it’s a very complicated story because it has multiple themes,” Horn says. “One that sticks out to me is that grief, wherever it’s from, can only be overcome by connecting with other people.

“Gosh, I’m sorry to give away any of the plot,” he quickly adds. It’s the first time the self-possessed actor sounds like the 14-year-old that he is.

In finding his way into portraying Oskar, Horn discovered some intersections between himself and his character. “For sure, we both like math. We like to make things make sense. We both have that passion. [But] he’s quite a fearful person, and, of course, he’s had a lot of grief. He’s afraid of machinery, especially if it’s loud or dangerous. He’s afraid of people. Anyone except his dad he considers to be frightful, strange.”

Horn’s big break stemmed from his appearance on “Jeopardy!” during Kids’ Week, when he won $31,800. Producer Scott Rudin saw the show and invited him to audition for “Extremely Loud.”

“I wasn’t in any way certain I was interested,” Horn says. But then, “I thought, ‘What do I have to lose?’”

When he was cast a month later, after a series of callback auditions, he says, “It was like a dream come true — except I never really had that dream.”

Asa Butterfield, 14

“Hugo”

Asa Butterfield has already starred in the disturbing Holocaust film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” and worked with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Now he heads a cast that features Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jude Law and fellow acting prodigy Chloë Grace Moretz in Martin Scorsese’s Thanksgiving release, “Hugo.” No one’s more surprised than he.

“Seven years ago, if you had said I was going to become an actor, I would have laughed at you, basically. I never thought of it. My life’s changed completely because of acting stuff. I’ve had a lot of great experiences,” says the Londoner. “I started off going to this acting club when I was about 7; I ended up getting into an agency, and one of the first things I got was ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.’”

Butterfield considers himself “a pretty good student,” currently immersed in photography and music (he plays piano, guitar and drums) as well as the usual subjects during the one-hour-of-work, one-hour-of-school on-set schedule. That helped when Scorsese gave him “homework” as well — movies to watch to familiarize himself with the early-film era that concerns “Hugo,” and other movies that inspired the director. No studying, however, could prepare Butterfield for the emotional demands of playing an orphan sustaining himself in a Parisian train station.

“The crying scenes were sort of mentally draining,” Butterfield says by phone. “That was the hardest thing. Getting to that emotional state was difficult, but then having to come back out of it and going in and out and in and out, then going and doing math and coming back and having to cry again, doing that for hours on end; it’s hard work.”

He bonded with Moretz, saying he found working with someone his age “far less nerve-racking than acting with someone like Sir Ben Kingsley — who’s amazing. It’s more laid-back, and we’d have a conversation you can’t really have with an adult, about computer games or something.”

It wasn’t all white-knuckle time with the grown-ups, though, particularly with Law.

“He was playing my dad, and he was only on set for a couple of weeks, but we got to be friends very quickly. We just had a great laugh. Rather than me being sad and an orphan, in those scenes [with Law], I’m a normal kid and I’m with my dad. It was very different to acting as an orphan. Everything’s just much more happy.”

Elle Fanning, 13

“We Bought a Zoo,” “Super 8”

Elle Fanning, on first meeting, is surprisingly tall (already 5 feet, 8 inches) and disarmingly bubbly. That seems to put her disposition closer to her wide-open, greet-the-world-with-a-smile character Lily in “We Bought a Zoo” than her guarded-but-resilient Alice in this summer’s alien-on-the-loose tale “Super 8.”

“I knew Alice so well, and me and [writer-director J.J. Abrams] would always talk about things and her relationship with her dad, who was an alcoholic and not really there,” Fanning says after school one evening at Studio City’s Artisan Cheese Gallery, where she had joined “Zoo” costar Colin Ford for a chat. “I would put myself in Alice’s place, and it would just sort of happen, I guess.”

She admits playing both Alice and Alice’s character in “Super 8’s” movie-within-a-movie could be tricky: “You had to act within acting. Alice is good; she’s not an amazing actress, but good enough so [the other kids] were impressed.”

That kind of technical control and awareness served her on “Zoo” as well, though she was playing a much more freewheeling person.

“Lily, her best friends are the animals at the zoo,” she says with a moon-faced smile. So when Ford’s Dylan moves in with his family, Lily is slightly thrown. “She doesn’t know how to act around kids her own age, let alone a boy. At first she approaches him like an animal, like Dylan’s a big cat. She’s such a sweet girl and, keeping her quirky personality, she finally learns how to act around this guy.” Fanning caps the thought with a giggle, a reminder that this polished actress is barely a teen. Another reminder: Her dreamy eye-roll at the mention of Ryan Gosling.

And while Fanning has a famous big sister, Dakota, blazing the trail, she also learns life lessons from colleagues, by example and maybe a bit of lecturing as well.

“Before I met Matt and Scarlett [on “Zoo”], they didn’t seem like real people. They were like, ‘Matt Damon’ and ‘Scarlett Johansson.’ Huge superstars. Then you meet them … Matt always had his family on set. They’d yell ‘Cut’ and all his girls would run up to him. He was so nice; he’s such a normal guy.”

And from Steven Spielberg, a producer on “Super 8,” she got another lesson in staying “normal.” Spielberg, she says, would talk about “working on ‘E.T.’ with all these kids. He always told them, ‘You need to have your home life and then go do your movies. Keep them separate.’ ‘Stay in school,’ things like that. So …,” she lets the thought trail off, chased by a little laugh, a good sign of a very normal adolescent girl.

Colin Ford, 15

“We Bought a Zoo”

Colin Ford was already a Cameron Crowe fan before being cast in the director’s recently released “We Bought a Zoo.” He calls “Jerry Maguire” one of his favorite films (he’s also a Tom Cruise fan) and is especially taken with the director’s use of music in his movies. So the veteran actor of nine years was delighted to find himself on set seeing firsthand how the filmmaker uses music in the creative process as well, playing songs before and even during takes.

“The music would get you to the place you needed to go and put a particular feeling or emotion on the scene itself. It could make you upset or angry,” he says, finding the technique particularly helpful in a confrontation scene between his character, the distant and angry Dylan, and his father, played by Matt Damon. “They don’t know how to talk to each other, and I think that’s where the frustration and emotion and anger come from.”

The Nashville native says he has continued using music as an inspiration, calling it “one of the coolest things I learned from Cameron.” He did have other resources to draw on, sadly useful when playing a boy who has lost his mother to illness.

“Tapping into the raw emotions for these scenes … my grandmother passed away a few years ago, so whenever I’m upset or distraught about losing a loved one [in a scene], whether it’s my mother or whatever, I tap into those feelings. It kind of flows,” he says at a Studio City eatery.

Playing Dylan also required Ford to allow himself to be unsympathetic at times: “I don’t think Dylan cared what anybody said to him. I think he enjoyed the attention he was getting from Lily [Elle Fanning playing the young love interest]; he dug it. But he was just really keeping to himself and didn’t want to deal with anybody.”

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