And I beat myself up to the point of shaking.” So of course when I couldn’t get it, I got frustrated with myself. “I got super anxious because I was on a Steven Spielberg set and I really wanted to do the best I could. “I was having trouble getting it out on set,” she remembers. 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. Reggie really wants to protect that and keep that fire lit.” “Her mother has such a way about her-this innocence, it’s like a breath of fresh air. “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. 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. Spielberg’s love of his sister is clear throughout The Fabelmans, shown through details and observations too specific to be made up-including her likening the family’s Northern California move to being “parachuted into the land of the giant sequoia people.” Although often in the periphery, Reggie’s protectiveness over her mother, Mitzi (played by Michelle Williams), breaks through. We have to make this worth it.’ And it turned out to be worth it.” “I remember just being like, ‘Don’t blow it. Just a handful of years later, Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s script, emblazoned with the Amblin Entertainment logo, came her way. “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.’”

I waved to him through the window, he waved to me, and I was freaking out,” Butters tells Vanity Fair during a recent Zoom. 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. At the age of 10, she stole scenes opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. She has yet to reach high school, but 13-year-old Julia Butters is already building the career of any actor’s dreams.

Julia butters nominations