Levi Miller takes flight as next Peter Pan
For a boy who’s not supposed to grow up, Pan star Levi Miller is failing in his duties.
The Australian actor just turned 13 last week while attending the Japanese premiere of his big-screen fantasy adventure (in theaters Friday), so he’s that much closer to adulthood — though he’s still got a tweenager’s high-pitched voice. Miller already has fallen hard for co-star Rooney Mara (“She’s very beautiful”), and he was caught getting kissed by supermodel Cara Delevingne in a London red-carpet situation.
But ask him about getting in a harness to fly around like the Peter Pan of leg- end, and it’s less talk of autographs and selfies and more Miller just being a kid in awe of his big break.
“It’s an 11-year-old boy’s imagination, and that’s what Neverland is and what makes it cool,” says Miller, a native of Brisbane.
In director Joe Wright’s prequel of sorts to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Peter (Miller) has grown up in an English orphanage after being left there by his mother — his only connection to her is the pan flute necklace he wears on his neck. When the minions of the notorious Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) come in a flying pirate ship to nab orphans to mine fairy dust in Neverland, Peter steals a ride and joins the fight to save the place as well as to find his mom.
The director went through the trial of appraising more than 4,500 boys before finding his Peter. “When Levi popped up, itmade it all worthwhile,” he says. “It was an easy epiphany.”
For Wright, one of the privileges of making Pan was watching Miller’s confi- dence grow as he came into his own as an actor.
“In the second week of rehearsals, he would call Hugh nothing but ‘Hugh Jackman,’ ” Wright recalls. “He’d say, ‘Good morning, Hugh Jackman,’ and ‘I don’t need a cup of tea, thank you, Hugh Jackman.’ It took about a week for Levi to call him Hugh and stop blushing whenever he came into the room.”
New American fans will be able to see Miller again sooner than later— he plays Carter Grant, the son of Calista Flockhart’s media mogul Cat Grant, in CBS’ upcoming Supergirl series.
So far, Miller says, Hollywood has been a “crazy” experience, especially for a kid far from being a jaded grown-up. “There’s so much going on. Every time you go on a set, it’s a whole different world, and I love that.”