North Side native Maxwell Jenkins is one child actor who's defied the Hollywood odds
At 19, Maxwell Jenkins has already achieved something remarkable in Hollywood — he’s still here.
The road to adult stardom is littered with kid actors chewed up and spat out by the movie-making machine. Think Corey Feldman and the entire kid cast of the NBC sitcom, “Diff’rent Strokes.”
Jenkins, a North Side native now starring alongside Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Nettles and Beth Grant in Blumhouse Television and Prime Video's “The Bondsman: Hell and Back,” (streaming April 3 on Prime Video) credits his parents with not letting Hollywood warp his childhood.
Perhaps best known for playing Will Robinson in Netflix’s “Lost in Space,” Jenkins was allowed one screen project a year until he was about 16, he said during a recent chat with the Sun-Times.
“For five of those years, it was 'Lost in Space, which I grew up on. That felt like a family. That felt like a village to me,” said Jenkins, who graduated from Lane Tech College Prep High School.
That show, which ran for three seasons, was mostly shot in British Columbia.
“They really let me be a kid — they let me go snowboarding,” he said of the show that ran from 2018 to 2021.
Jenkins’ life in the spotlight actually began many years before that, when, at age 3, he first performed with Chicago's Midnight Circus, which his parents founded and which features a big top and entertainers traveling to communities across the city.
Jenkins still tries to perform in at least one circus show annually — when there’s time, which is in short supply. He’s balancing life as a student majoring in global studies at UCLA. He’s also on the university’s cheer squad. And he plays in a band in Los Angeles.
And, of course, he’s promoting “The Bondsman,” a show in which Bacon plays a bounty hunter who is murdered but then is brought back to life to track down and retrieve demons who’ve literally escaped from hell. Jenkins plays Bacon’s character’s son in the show, which debuts April 3 on Prime Video.
Jenkins previously played Nicholas Cage’s kid in “Arcadian,” a sci-fi horror film released last year.
“Nick is definitely eccentric and a huge history buff and has a million wild stories that are really fun to listen to," Jenkins said.
About a month shy of his 20th birthday and six feet tall, Jenkins hasn’t grown weary of playing "kid" roles — especially when he gets to work with veterans, such as Bacon and Cage, he said.
“They are incredible actors but they are also incredible teachers ...,” Jenkins said. “I don’t mind soaking up the knowledge while I still can.”
Music features prominently in "The Bondsman," and Jenkins played his mandolin and guitar for the audition.
“There were times when I would text (Bacon, also the show's executive producer) ideas for a mandolin solo over a song that we play toward the end of the series and he was completely open to it to the point where that solo ended up making it in," Jenkins said.
Much of Jenkins' more recent work features the actor in extreme peril, trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic planet ("Arcadian") or fleeing an increasingly uninhabitable Earth ("Lost in Space").
“I guess people love to see me scream and run, fight monsters, wield swords and laser guns," Jenkins joked.
In college, Jenkins' global studies professors often give a "doomsday speech" when discussing the fate of the planet.
"Maybe to a fault, I'm an optimist. Maybe that stems from the characters I’ve played growing up — they are these optimists in times of destruction and social upheaval and apocalypse," Jenkins said, adding “There are too many smart people across the world to let us end up in a situation like I guess we would in 'Arcadian' or 'Lost in Space.'”
At an age when many actors are just, well, aspiring to make it in the field, Jenkins has more than a decade under his belt and is in a good position to offer advice to others who are trying to make it in Hollywood.
What would he say to those folks?
“Keep living a normal life and have interests outside of the industry ... because it’s hard to play a normal person if you’ve never been a normal person," he said. "That's my biggest advice to young actors."
Jenkins doesn't envision a time when he's not in show business, but he also doesn't want to waste what he's learning in college.
“I’d love to find that intersection where my experience in the film industry can meet my passion for the social sciences and I think there are plenty of people out there who do that and I’d like to join them," he said.