With 'The Fabelmans,' Julia Butters Reaches New Hollywood Heights - Vanity Fair

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She’s only 13 years old, but has already sparred with Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and now plays a version of Steven Spielberg’s sister in his most personal film to date.

By Savannah Walsh

November 23, 2022

With 'The Fabelmans' Julia Butters Reaches New Hollywood Heights

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.”

Her scene partner, LaBelle, pulled her aside. “Tell me what I can do to help,” he said. After a long conversation, LaBelle offered Butters Michael Caine’s Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making to help ease her racing mind. “I definitely cherished that day for a while,” she remembers. “He was able to get [my anxiety] away from me, and make me feel safe on set, and cared for.” That scene was eventually cut, but she now looks back on that day not with embarrassment, but as the time “I established a bond with my brother.”

By Everett Collection.

Butters keeps that book in her “Spielberg bin” alongside a drawing the director made while coloring on set with the kids, and a pine cone she found mid-filming. (She wasn’t allowed to keep her character’s period-accurate eyewear.) Butters stores away mementos from all of her movies, including this year’s big-budget Netflix thriller The Gray Man and her upcoming project, Queen of Bones, in which she stars alongside Martin Freeman and Jacob Tremblay.

Having worked with two of cinema’s most celebrated directors before getting her driver’s license (or permit, for that matter), one can’t help but sneak a few Tarantino-versus-Spielberg questions into the conversation. Of the Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood set, Butters says, “There were food fights at lunch, and it was a lot of fun. It was an environment that felt like a lot of high school buddies reuniting,” as opposed to The Fabelmans, where the cast had more of a “quiet, tender relationship.” She adds of the two auteurs: “They’re very similar in the way that they have such a clear vision of what they would like, and they don’t give up.”

Butters hasn’t reached the MPAA-mandated age to actually see Tarantino flicks, although she was allowed to watch most of her own film with him, which she calls “a masterpiece.” The actor has, however, delved deep into Spielberg’s filmography. “I love Jaws, for sure,” she says. “And I would say Jurassic Park. I think those are my top two.”

Being a child actor in the era of social media can be tricky, Butter says. But the key is to differentiate between both identities. “I really try to let it be known that being a child [and] actor are two different things,” she explains with the polish of someone decades older. “When I’m a child, I’m a child. I have friends. I’m able to go outside and touch some grass. I’m not always busy. I’m able to have little moments to myself, and with my friends, and with my family. But I’m still an actor. And while I’m still a minor, I like to be treated like a professional and not a kid.”

For Butters, The Fabelmans’ most lasting legacy may be her relationship with the real-life Anne. They first met in the woods, while shooting the family’s fateful camping trip. “I remember she just hugged me for almost a minute. We didn’t say anything,” says Butters. “It was a very beautiful moment.” Months later, at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere, where the film would win the highly coveted People’s Choice Award, they held hands during specific scenes.

And in between those milestones, Anne gifted the actor with what has become her most treasured trinket. “On the wrap day, she gave me her high school ring from 1967,” Butters recalls. “She told me that she was wearing this ring when everything went down in real life. I guard it with my life. And I wear it all the time. It’s such an honor.”