Elsie Fisher is the American actor who starred in Eighth Grade and played Lila in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022).
Quick Specs
| Born | Elsie Kate Fisher, April 3, 2003, Riverside, California |
| Screen debut | Medium (2009), aged six |
| Voice | Agnes in Despicable Me (2010) and Despicable Me 2 (2013); Masha in the English dub of Masha and the Bear |
| Breakthrough | Kayla Day in Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018) |
| Horror run | Ina in The Axe Murders of Villisca (2016); Joy Wilkes in Castle Rock season 2 (2019); Lila in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022); Abby in My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2022) |
| Awards for Eighth Grade | Critics’ Choice Best Young Actor/Actress (win); Gotham Award for Breakthrough Actor (win); Golden Globe and Independent Spirit nominations |
| Later TV | Katie Harris in Barry (2022 to 2023); Skye in The Summer I Turned Pretty (2023) |
Who They Are
Elsie Kate Fisher was born in Riverside, California, on April 3, 2003. They started working at six, in a 2009 episode of NBC’s Medium, playing Young Bridgette DuBois in “Then and Again.” By March 2016, aged twelve, they had made more than 16 national commercials alongside their film and television work.
Fisher graduated from eighth grade one week before production began on Eighth Grade. After filming they started high school, where they weren’t cast in the school play, which Bo Burnham has said publicly disgusted him.
The Work, and What They Did in It
The early years were voice work. Fisher voiced Masha in the English dub of the Russian cartoon Masha and the Bear, and then Agnes, the youngest of the three orphan sisters Gru adopts, in Despicable Me (2010). Agnes’s squeal over a stuffed unicorn, “It’s so fluffy I’m gonna die!”, became the franchise’s most quoted line. Fisher was a real small child among older co-stars, seven when the film came out, and the performance is a genuine little kid’s. They voiced Agnes again in Despicable Me 2 (2013) and in short films of that era, and that is where their time in the role ends. Agnes was recast for the third and fourth films.
Their live-action film debut was Tiffany Briggs in Dirty Girl (2010). They played Jamie White in Disney’s McFarland, USA (2015), and they had a horror credit before anyone knew their name: Ina in The Axe Murders of Villisca (2016), a period horror film about the 1912 Villisca murders.
Then came Eighth Grade (2018), Bo Burnham’s first film as writer and director, made with A24 and premiered at Sundance. Fisher plays Kayla Day, a shy, anxious 13-year-old in her last week of middle school who posts confident advice videos to an audience of almost nobody. Burnham found Fisher on YouTube and had them audition three times. They were 13 and had been struggling to find a part that showed teenagers realistically. Burnham explained his choice: Fisher was “the only one who felt like a shy kid pretending to be confident, while everyone else felt like a confident kid pretending to be shy.” The first audition material was Kayla’s videos, and Fisher has said they identified with Kayla’s speech mannerisms “because that’s the way I talk.” In an industry that casts adults as teenagers, Fisher played Kayla at Kayla’s real age, which is the performance’s signature. The film grossed $13.5 million in North America as an arthouse hit.
The awards record needs precision. Fisher won the Critics’ Choice award for Best Young Actor/Actress and was nominated at the same ceremony for Best Actress in a Comedy. They won the Gotham Award for Breakthrough Actor and the Chicago Film Critics Association’s Most Promising Performer, along with breakthrough and youth awards from critics’ groups in Florida, New York, Seattle, Utah and Washington, D.C. They were nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead. Those last two were nominations, not wins.
The horror run started with a bridge. Fisher voiced Parker Needler, daughter of Allison Janney’s villain, in The Addams Family (2019). The same year they had a main role in all ten episodes of Castle Rock season 2, Hulu’s Stephen King anthology, which built its season around a young Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan). Fisher played Joy, Annie’s homeschooled teenage daughter, a character invented for the series, who begins to suspect something is wrong with her mother. Joy is the season’s moral viewpoint, the ordinary teenager watching a King monster assemble itself at the kitchen table, and it’s Fisher’s biggest horror role by screen time.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), directed by David Blue Garcia and released on Netflix on February 18, 2022, is a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original that ignores everything in between. Fisher plays Lila, the teenage younger sister of Melody (Sarah Yarkin). The sisters travel with friends to the remote town of Harlow, Texas, on an idealistic business venture and disturb Leatherface’s home. Fisher carries the film’s survivor arc opposite the returning Sally Hardesty, played now by Olwen Fouéré in Marilyn Burns’s old role. Critics were hostile: 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 162 reviews (average 4.3 out of 10) and 34 on Metacritic. Audiences watched anyway. It logged 29.2 million hours viewed in its first week, No. 2 on Netflix worldwide and No. 1 in the US.
My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2022), directed by Damon Thomas from Grady Hendrix’s novel and released on Prime Video on September 30, 2022, stars Fisher as Abby Rivers, a 1988 high-school sophomore trying to save her best friend Gretchen (Amiah Miller) from demonic possession. Fisher described it as feeling “a lot of ways like a coming-of-age movie, but it’s also a horror, but it’s also sort of a campy horror comedy.” In one year they headlined a legacy slasher and a possession film, the two poles of mainstream horror.
Also in 2022, Fisher played Cassie Worth in Family Squares and began a recurring role as Katie Harris in seasons 3 and 4 of Bill Hader’s Barry. In 2023 they were a series regular as Skye, a character created for the second season of The Summer I Turned Pretty. Since then the path has been independent film: Sara in Michel Franco’s Memory (2023), with Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, and Lynn in Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024). The record is young and still being written.
Cool Verified Facts
- On Family Squares, Fisher is also credited as an additional camera operator.
- On the 2010 Despicable Me red carpet, Dana Gaier, who voiced Edith, held seven-year-old Fisher’s hand. Fisher later called her a role model and an “older sister” figure.
- Two horror films in 2022 put Fisher in the lead of both a Texas Chainsaw sequel and a Grady Hendrix adaptation.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
Fisher’s defining quality is playing their actual age while the industry casts older: a real small child’s Agnes, a real 13-year-old’s Kayla, cast at 13 and fresh out of eighth grade, and teenagers again as Joy and Lila.
The horror run looks like a choice. Talking about My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Fisher spoke as a genre fan, fond of 1980s horror’s mix of camp and real scares and of films that keep “more grounded moments” inside the fun.
Burnham’s casting line is the best behind-the-scenes quote in the record, because it explains the whole Eighth Grade performance: a shy kid pretending to be confident, not the other way round.
Why They Matter
Elsie Fisher had made two generational marks before turning 16. Their voice is inside one of the biggest animated franchises ever made, as Agnes in the first two films, and their face is at the center of Eighth Grade, the defining screen portrait of early-teen social-media anxiety.
For horror, the 2019 to 2022 run is a real résumé, not a dabble: the viewpoint lead of a Stephen King television season as Annie Wilkes’s daughter, the final girl of a Texas Chainsaw legacy sequel, and the lead of a Grady Hendrix possession story. That’s three horror modes in three years, King gothic, slasher and possession, each time as the character the audience identifies with rather than a victim of the week.
Productions keep casting Fisher because they can’t fake what Fisher simply is at that age. Whatever the adult career becomes, the child and teen work is already part of the culture.