Top 5 Ryan Grantham Movies, Ranked

There’s a version of Ryan Grantham’s career that most people don’t know exists beyond the one role that made him recognizable to a generation of kids. He built his filmography almost entirely through Canadian indie productions and supporting parts, quietly racking up screen time in projects that ranged from supernatural thrillers to magical-realist family films. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances based on how much presence Grantham brought to each role: the moments where he felt like the most interesting person in the scene, the characters who stuck with us after the credits rolled, and the films where his specific contribution actually mattered to the story being told.

5. Way of the Wicked (2014)

Young Robbie is the kind of role that could easily disappear into the background of a supernatural thriller, but Grantham makes sure it doesn’t. As the younger version of the film’s central antagonist, he has to plant the seeds of something genuinely unsettling, and there’s a stillness to how he plays the character that works better than any amount of scenery-chewing would. The scenes where Robbie interacts with adults carry this low-level unease, like he knows something nobody else does and isn’t particularly bothered by it. Sharing the screen with Christian Slater gives the film more weight than its budget might suggest, and Grantham holds his own in that dynamic without overplaying his hand.

4. Considering Love and Other Magic (2016)

Tommy gets to exist in a softer, stranger world than most of the characters Grantham played during this stretch, and you can feel him settling into that space with real comfort. The film’s magical-realist tone asks its young lead to carry emotional weight that goes beyond reaction shots and plot function, and there are quieter scenes here where Grantham lets the feeling land without pushing it. A moment late in the film where Tommy processes a loss with almost no dialogue is the one to watch closely — he keeps his hands very still, eyes slightly unfocused, and the grief reads as something he’s holding rather than performing, which tells you a lot about where Grantham was as a physical actor at that point in his career.

3. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

Little Anton lives in one of the most visually chaotic films of that era, and the challenge for any young actor in Terry Gilliam’s world is simply not getting swallowed by it. Grantham doesn’t get swallowed. As the younger version of Anton — the troupe’s nervous, loyal stagehand who grows into Doctor Parnassus’s right-hand man — he mirrors the character’s sense of wonder without tipping into wide-eyed mugging. The film was already navigating impossible circumstances, completing Heath Ledger’s unfinished performance across four replacement actors, and Grantham’s grounded, consistent work gave the whole thing an emotional anchor it desperately needed. There’s a specific moment where Little Anton first steps through the Imaginarium’s mirror and his body goes completely still, just his eyes moving slowly across the frame, that quiet physical choice doing more work than any reaction shot could, and it’s what makes you trust the film’s wilder flights of fantasy when they arrive.

2. Becoming Redwood (2012)

Redwood Forest Hanson is the role where Grantham got the most room to breathe, and he uses every bit of it. As the lead of this Canadian indie, he carries scenes that depend entirely on his ability to make a kid’s internal world feel real and specific, and he pulls it off with a naturalness that doesn’t feel like acting so much as just being. There’s a sequence where Redwood is trying to process something too big for him to fully articulate, and Grantham plays it through small physical choices: a glance held a beat too long, a breath taken at the wrong moment. The film won the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Most Popular Canadian Film Award, which matters because that’s an audience vote, not an industry one. Real people responded to this performance.

1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)

Rodney James doesn’t have the most screen time, but he has some of the most memorable moments, and Grantham understood exactly what the character needed to be: the kid everyone in the audience has either known or been. His comedic timing in the scenes where Rodney gets caught up in middle school social chaos is precise without feeling rehearsed. There’s a specific bit involving a school performance where he commits so fully to the embarrassment that the whole theater feels it. The film earned $75 million worldwide and connected with an entire generation of kids who grew up on Jeff Kinney’s books. For most fans, this is the first and clearest answer to who Ryan Grantham is as a performer, and what makes it stick is that quiet specificity — he never seemed to be performing for the camera so much as just living inside the scene, and Rodney is where you first notice it.