Top 13 Joey King Movies, Ranked

Joey King has never been content doing one thing. She voiced a porcelain doll, terrified audiences in a haunted house, manipulated Brad Pitt on a speeding bullet train, and became a Netflix phenomenon before turning 25. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how much they stuck with us after the credits rolled: the moments that felt real, the characters we couldn’t shake, and the scenes where King made you forget you were watching an actor work. Her ability to shift between wide-eyed vulnerability and cold, calculating precision within a single scene is what separates her from peers in her age group. Whether she’s delivering a gut-punch emotional breakdown or landing a perfectly timed dark comedy beat, King commits completely, and audiences have responded by turning her projects into genuine cultural talking points. From her earliest scene-stealing turns to the role that made her a household name, this list covers the full picture.

13. Wish I Was Here (2014)

Grace Bloom is a small role in a crowded ensemble, but King brings something quietly specific to her that makes it worth revisiting. Playing Zach Braff’s spiritually curious daughter, she finds a genuine stillness in scenes that could easily have been played as precocious-kid filler. There’s a particular quality to the way Grace listens in her conversations with her grandfather, absorbing rather than performing, which is a real skill for an actor still in her early teens. Wish I Was Here didn’t make a huge splash, but the role is a small, thoughtful piece of King’s pre-teen filmography that shows her dramatic instincts developing in real time.

12. The Lie (2018)

Kayla is one of the more unsettling characters King has ever played, and the unsettling part is how casually she plays her. The premise hinges on a teenager whose single terrible decision sends her parents into a spiral of increasingly desperate cover-ups, and King leans into Kayla’s chilling matter-of-factness rather than reaching for guilt or remorse. There’s a scene early on where Kayla explains what she did with almost no emotional register, and the flatness of it is what makes your skin crawl. It’s one of the few times she’s been asked to play someone genuinely morally irredeemable, and she handles it without flinching.

11. A Family Affair (2024)

Zara Ford is essentially the audience surrogate in a movie where her mom (Nicole Kidman) starts dating her movie-star boss (Zac Efron), and King plays the exasperation of that situation with a comedic specificity that keeps the film grounded. Her best moments come from the physical comedy: the double-takes, the barely-suppressed horror at family dinners, the way she delivers lines like she’s been worn down to the bone by everyone around her. Sharing a frame with Kidman and Efron without getting swallowed up is its own accomplishment, and Zara’s running commentary on the absurdity of her situation is the comedic thread that holds the whole premise together.

10. Summer ‘03 (2018)

This is the underseen one. Jamie Winkle is a sharp, funny, emotionally messy teenager navigating a chaotic summer after her grandmother drops some life-altering confessions on the family, and King plays her with a looseness that doesn’t show up as often in her bigger productions. Critics who caught the film specifically flagged her lead performance as its strongest element, and it’s easy to see why: Jamie feels lived-in rather than constructed, and King finds real humor in the character without sacrificing the emotional beats. A scene where Jamie processes a piece of family news with deadpan bewilderment is exactly the kind of low-key comic timing that tends to get overlooked in favor of flashier work.

9. Despicable Me 4 (2024)

Poppy Prescott wants to be a supervillain, and King’s voice performance leans fully into that aspiration with a bright, slightly unhinged comic energy that fits the franchise’s tone perfectly. What she does well here is pitch Poppy as a credible threat within the world of the film while keeping her funny to the audience: there’s a gleeful menace in her delivery during Poppy’s scheming scenes that never tips into cartoonish shrieking. Stepping into a franchise that millions of kids already love and making a new character feel like she belongs there is harder than it sounds. The moment Poppy lays out her villain plan with that barely-contained giddiness in her voice — like she’s one step ahead and absolutely delighted about it — is exactly why she pulls it off.

8. White House Down (2013)

Emily Cale could have been a standard action-movie hostage kid, but King plays her as someone with actual agency, and the film is smarter for it. The flag-waving scene, where Emily steps outside onto the White House lawn and waves a presidential flag to wave off incoming fighter planes, became the film’s most meme-able moment for a reason: it’s absurd and earnest at the same time, and King plays it completely straight, which is the only way it works. Her chemistry with Channing Tatum as her father gives the movie its emotional stakes, and their back-and-forth feels warm rather than manufactured. Emily gets to be a hero in her own right, and King earns every one of those moments.

7. Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)

Voice acting for a fully CGI character is a specific technical challenge: you’re doing all the emotional work without your face, your body, or any physical scene partner to react to. King’s China Girl is a porcelain doll with a fiery personality, and what makes the performance work is the contrast between the character’s fragile appearance and the sheer stubbornness in King’s vocal delivery. When China Girl insists on being taken seriously despite being small and breakable, you believe it because the voice has real conviction behind it. The character became one of the film’s most discussed elements, and that’s entirely a product of what King brought to the booth.

6. Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

Molly Weaver is the youngest kid in a family-comedy ensemble that includes Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Emma Stone, which is a lot of star power to hold your own against at any age. King does it by playing Molly with a natural, unforced quality that never feels like she’s performing for the camera. Her scenes are small, but there’s a moment where Molly reacts to a piece of family news with a mix of confusion and quiet sadness that lands harder than it has any right to. Crazy, Stupid, Love. holds up as one of the sharper romantic comedies of its era, and King fits into it like she belongs there.

5. Ramona and Beezus (2010)

Ramona Quimby is the role that started everything. King was nine years old, already carrying a feature film on her back, and she does it with a charm and physical energy that never feels forced. Ramona is a kid who exists at full volume: she’s imaginative, impulsive, occasionally infuriating, and completely lovable, and King plays all of that without making it feel like a performance. She won a Young Artist Award for the role, and watching the film now, it’s easy to see why: there’s a scene where Ramona tries to salvage a disastrous school project with complete, unshakeable confidence, and King plays it with a commitment that makes you root for her immediately. Everything that came after traces back to this one.

4. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Young Talia al Ghul appears in a flashback sequence, and King has almost no dialogue. What she has instead is one of the film’s most haunting images: a small girl clawing her way out of a pit while everyone around her fails to escape, driven by a desperation that feels completely real. Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar finale to his Batman trilogy is no small stage, and King fills her few minutes of screen time with a physical intensity that makes the backstory land. The wordless quality of the escape is actually what makes it so effective: there’s nothing to hide behind, just the performance, and it holds up. The moment that sticks is how King uses her hands — gripping the rock face with a frantic urgency that reads less like climbing and more like survival.

3. Bullet Train (2022)

Prince is introduced as a sweet-faced British schoolgirl, and then the movie slowly, deliciously reveals what she actually is. King plays the gap between those two versions of the character with real precision: the smile stays in place, the voice stays soft, and the body language stays open, even as Prince does increasingly cold-blooded things. There’s a scene where she talks a grieving father through his grief while simultaneously manipulating him toward a specific outcome, and King holds both registers at once without letting either slip. Stealing scenes in a Brad Pitt blockbuster full of charismatic character actors is a real accomplishment, and Prince is the performance that proved King could work at that level.

2. The Conjuring (2013)

Christine Perron could have been just another scared kid in a haunted house movie, but Joey King plays her with a specificity that makes the whole Perron family feel real rather than functional. The Perron children could easily have blurred together, yet King gives Christine her own distinct flavor of dread that separates her from the ensemble. There’s a scene where Christine wakes up with bruises she can’t explain, and the way King plays the dawning horror of that moment, the confusion giving way to genuine fear, is the kind of naturalistic child acting that’s harder to pull off than it looks. That grounded quality is exactly what the Perron family scenes need to land emotionally, and King never lets Christine slip into background noise even when the supernatural chaos is at its loudest.

1. The Kissing Booth Franchise (2018–2021)

Elle Evans is the role. Across three films, King built a character that Netflix audiences came back to in numbers that caught the industry off guard: the original Kissing Booth became one of the platform’s most-rewatched films ever, and the sequels kept that audience engaged through a full trilogy arc. What makes Elle work isn’t the love triangle mechanics or the high school drama; it’s the way King plays her as someone actively trying to figure herself out, making bad decisions with real emotional stakes behind them. In Kissing Booth 2, the scene where Elle must choose between her best friend and the relationship she’s built her identity around lands because King plays it as something that actually costs her. The franchise has its critics, but the audience connection is undeniable, and that connection runs directly through King’s performance.

Joey King has been working since childhood, and the range across this list speaks for itself: horror, action, indie comedy, animated blockbuster, Netflix phenomenon. Her Emmy-nominated turn in The Act and early work on Fargo prove the screen she performs on has never limited what she’s capable of. The interesting question isn’t whether she can handle different material; she’s already answered that. It’s which version of her talent gets the biggest stage next.