Jacob Tremblay says he avoided the worst of child stardom because home never stopped feeling like home. The actor, now 20, said his parents Jason and Christina kept him close to a normal routine as his career took off, and that balance is part of why he says he stayed grounded while working from age five.
Tremblay is back in the spotlight because Unabomber lands on Netflix on Sept. 25, giving viewers a new turn from the actor who broke through in Room when he was nine. In the film directed by Janus Metz Pedersen, he plays 16-year-old Ted Kaczynski, a role that arrives as Tremblay talks more openly about the habits that helped him keep his head clear as fame started to build.
He said going to public school made a big difference. He attended Gordon Greenwood Elementary and Walnut Grove Secondary in Langley, and he said that after work he still had friends to see and bikes to ride, even as Hollywood began to pull him back to Los Angeles for jobs after Room became a hit. That split life, he said, gave him what he called the best of both worlds.
It also gave him a buffer. Tremblay said Hollywood had the potential to get in your head, but he was really close with his team and with his parents, and he said that trust mattered. He compared the experience to Hannah Montana in a way, because he could move between work and a regular childhood without letting one erase the other.
That normalcy did not come without a constant pull in the other direction. While he says his parents made sure he came home to an ordinary life, his career kept widening, with work alongside Brie Larson and Julia Robert and regular trips to Los Angeles. The contrast is what makes his account stand out: he was already living the kind of split existence that often trips up child actors, but he seems to have had guardrails in place before the pressure became the story.
Unabomber itself turns to a very different kind of life, tracing Ted Kaczynski’s path from gifted student to domestic terrorist and the manhunt that followed. Kaczynski skipped two high school grades and went to Harvard at age 16, later sending his first bomb at age 36. Over the next 18 years, he killed three people and injured 23 others before The FBI caught him in a remote cabin in Lincoln, Mont., in 1996 after the 17-year-long hunt. Tremblay’s story is the lighter one, but the timing is the point: the actor who says public school kept him normal is now fronting a drama about a life that veered far off course.
For Tremblay, Sept. 25 is not just another release date. It is the moment his own childhood story and his latest screen role meet in public, and the part that lingers is not the fame but the structure that kept it from swallowing him.
