She has yet to reach high school, but 13-year-old Julia Butters is already building the career of any actor’s dreams. At the age of 10, she stole scenes opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. It was on that set where Butters would first meet Steven Spielberg, who cast her as a proxy for his eldest sister in his memoir film, The Fablemans.
“I saw Steven walking around the valet [at Universal Studios]. I waved to him through the window, he waved to me, and I was freaking out,” Butters tells Vanity Fair during a recent Zoom. “That was my only interaction with Steven Spielberg ever, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to him.’”
Her prediction didn’t age well. Just a handful of years later, Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s script, emblazoned with the Amblin Entertainment logo, came her way. “I was so excited,” Butters says. “I remember just being like, ‘Don’t blow it. You gotta try your best. You gotta try your hardest. We have to make this worth it.’ And it turned out to be worth it.”
After securing the role of Reggie, inspired by Spielberg’s real-life sister Anne, Butters had just one question: “Is there a monkey in this movie?” The actor had watched Spielberg, a 2017 HBO documentary about the legendary filmmaker, which recounts the time his mother spontaneously brought a pet monkey home. “I had this joke on set where that was what made me want to do the movie,” she says. “That was the deal—if there was a monkey, I would work on it.” And how was it sharing the screen with an orangutan? Says Butters, “Crystal was such an incredible actress.”
Spielberg’s love of his sister is clear throughout The Fabelmans, shown through details and observations too specific to be made up—from her likening the family’s Northern California move to being “parachuted into the land of the giant sequoia people” to asking when “Sammy” plans on making movies with roles for girls. Although often in the periphery, Reggie’s protectiveness over her mother, Mitzi (played by Michelle Williams), breaks through. During a camping trip, she shields her inebriated mother, dancing by the fire in a transparent nightgown, from prying eyes. And after learning of her parents’ split, she observes that it must be difficult for their mother to be “loved by someone who worships” her as their father does.
“She feels a responsibility to be kind of the mother of the family while her mom is out playing and dancing and having fun and living life,” Butters tells me of Reggie. “Her mother has such a way about her—this innocence, it’s like a breath of fresh air. She feels youthful and young and happy. She just radiates such a glow. Reggie really wants to protect that and keep that fire lit.”
Butters, who plays Reggie from ages 13 to 16, grew similarly attached to her onscreen Fabelmans family—Williams as free-spirited mother Mitzi, Paul Dano as by-the-numbers father Arnold, fellow sisters Natalie (Keeley Karsten) and Lisa (Sophia Kopera), and Gabriel LaBelle, who plays the Spielberg-inspired character of Sammy. “We all built a safe space where you can say what’s on your mind if you’re feeling anxious or sad or happy,” Butters says. “And I think that was really important with such an intense set,” adding of her younger costars, “We were all geeking out over the fact that we had made our dreams come true, working with Steven.”
When I ask Butters if she had jitters about meeting the real-life Anne, who would, after the period depicted in the movie, go on to cowrite and produce Big, starring Tom Hanks, she pauses. “I get nervous about everything, so that’s kind of a funny question.” Butters, who played a kid with obsessive-compulsive disorder on the ABC sitcom American Housewife, says she struggles with her own anxieties, which made their own appearance on the set of The Fabelmans.
One day, a scene involving Reggie and Sammy quickly bantering while washing dishes was placed in front of Butters, who was in the thick of schoolwork, just 30 minutes before it was meant to be filmed. “I was having trouble getting it out on set,” she remembers. “I got super anxious because I was on a Steven Spielberg set and I really wanted to do the best I could. So of course when I couldn’t get it, I got frustrated with myself. And I beat myself up to the point of shaking.”
Savannah Walsh
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