1 of 6 | Asa Butterfield, seen at the 2022 International Emmy Awards in New York City, voices “Stitch Head.” File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
Asa Butterfield says it doesn’t feel extraordinary to have had a 20-year acting career by age 28. The animated film Stitch Head, in theaters Wednesday, allows him to play a kid again.
In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Butterfield reflected on having a decades-long career history at such a young age. Still, Stitch Head is his first lead role as a voiceover artist in an animated film, aside from one episode of Thunderbirds Are Go.
“It’s what I’ve been doing so it feels very normal to me, but to have a 20-year career at something at 28 is pretty unusual,” Butterfield said. “Acting is one of the few careers where that’s possible, but I feel pretty experienced. I feel like I know what I’m doing at this point.”
Stitch Head is a creature assembled by a professor (Rob Brydon) from different parts. Stitch befriends the professor’s latest creation, Creature (Joel Fry).
Butterfield embraced playing a character who may not even be technically human.
“The reality no longer matters,” he said. “That’s the most exciting thing, stepping into the shoes or claws or slimes of whatever creature you choose to inhabit.”
Stitch Head does not sound like Butterfield, who explained two factors that went into the voice he assumed as Stitch.
“The way he looks, he’s literally been stitched together so thinking we had to have that broken, patched up, creaky quality to his voice,” Butterfield said. “He’s full of self doubt. So we wanted this uncertainty, this confusion, this softness to his voice.”
Stitch Head is also a musical. Most songs are performed by carnival barker Fulbert Freakfinder (Seth Usdenov), but Butterfield has a rap.
“Doing rap in a Stitchy voice was a bit of a challenge but it was one I was up for,” Butterfield said.
Fulbert offers Stitch a starring role in his show, leading Stitch to join the carnival in hopes of getting more attention than the professor gives him. Unfortunately, Stitch learns the hard way that show business is not very nurturing, a message that harkens back to classic fairy tales.
‘It’s a little bit of Pinocchio,” Butterfield said. “There’s some Frankenstein, obviously, and a bit of Coraline. It’s nice to see this movie that respects those classics.”
The professor’s creatures also fear the local townsfolk more than the people fear the creatures, which reminded Butterfield of other animated classics.
“It’s a little bit of Monsters, Inc. in there,” he said.
Butterfield said he was not thinking about a long-term career when he was a child actor. He believes that helped him persevere in the industry.
“For the first few years, I just enjoyed it for what it was,” he said. “I never anticipated being an actor as an adult, which I actually think worked in my favor because I never put too much pressure on myself.”
Now that Butterfield is established, he said he has even more fun than he used to.
“I think even more fun now that I’m old enough to get my teeth into it and be old enough to still learn, and also have the confidence to see what I’ve done,” he said.
Some of Butterfield’s early roles were in films not meant for children, such as the Holocaust drama The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. In that film, Butterfield played the son of a German commandant who befriends a child inside a concentration camp.
“Some things a 10-year-old doesn’t need to know about yet, so they kept me from some of the most horrible details,” Butterfield reflected. “I’d read the book and we’d studied the Second World War in school. The movie’s about innocence so they tried to preserve my innocence as much as they could.”
At 13, Butterfield’s Hollywood breakthrough came in Hugo, director Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the Brian Selznick children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Set in 1931 Paris and rooted in the classic films of George Méliès, Butterfield said he fell in love with acting and filmmaking through the various departments of that film.
“It was like a film history school,” he said. “I hadn’t seen any of Scorsese’s films at the time. I was 13. Most of his movies aren’t suitable to 13-year-olds. I think I’d seen The King of Comedy, one of the few movies I did watch.”
Most recently, viewers saw a somewhat older Butterfield in the teen comedy series Sex Education. After four seasons, Butterfield felt he and his co-stars had changed significantly from when they began.
“At the end of that season, we’d all grown up a lot and were all ready to move onto something new,” he said. “It was something I was super proud of and I’m proud of everyone who made that possible.”
Butterfield’s next live-action role will also show new sides to him. In Our Hero Balthazar, Butterfield plays a gun lover who trolls a teen’s (Jaeden Martell) gun control social media videos.
“That’s a really powerful, dark buddy comedy about what’s going on in America right now with political unrest, gun control and the woke movement of young people,” Butterfield said. “It’s a really fascinating blend of two very different young men in two very different castes of America, and how they fall under a shared lack of representation.”
