1) Chloe Moretz – Kick-Ass
Aside from a couple of TV appearances, in which she was mostly just credited as herself, Chloe Moretz arrived on the movie scene in Andrew Douglas’ 2005 film The Amityville Horror as four year old Chelsea. Although the role didn’t require a huge amount from her, what was needed she gave with a clear, natural sense of the art. Also, she was definitively cute.
She followed up Amityville Horror with a role as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s younger sister in 500 Days of Summer, where she continued to make an impression with her effortless on-screen presence, and again, that distinctive sweet face.
Neither of these films can be counted as her breakout roles, however. Yet we do clearly have a developing theme. The first is that Moretz knew how to deliver a line. The second is that she was ridiculously cute. And for the role that did put her well and truly on the map, it is really that second point that you need to bear in mind.
In 2010, Moretz was cast in Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn’s movie about a nobody-boy who reinvents himself as a super-hero. Moretz played Hit-Girl, one half of a father-daughter team who had already been working undercover in this sort of way for a few years, and had become extremely good at it.
Hit-Girl’s first appearance in the movie happens as a knife-impaled drug dealer, who was moments from killing Kick-Ass, falls forwards to the ground to reveal standing behind him a little girl wearing a purple wig, a leather jacket, a tiny lone-ranger-esque eyeband, and a tartan skirt. Despite the alarm bells that had – somewhat understandably – begun to ring as she withdraws the sword from the dead man’s back with a flourish worthy of a majorette, there was something still quite beguiling about the overall effect.
And then she utters her first line.
Let’s not be prim here, it’s not the word itself – as taboo as the ‘C’ word seems to remain it isn’t difficult to make it funny (think the poker scene in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – or, just, the entirety of In Bruges) – it was simply the sight of it coming from this diminutive little figure who looked more like a Bratz doll than an assassin, and that she leered it with such calm, lip-curling venom that she instantly became the most terrifying character below the age (and equivalent in inches) of 11 since Danny DeVito’s grossly creepy baby in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
The fact that this line was going to happen had been leaked a long time before the film’s release, and even if the exact phrase wasn’t known, people were expecting to hear a little girl spouting some kind of shocking profanity. But nothing compared to the moment of hearing and seeing the real thing.
Mindy, as Hit-Girl is really named, continues to build on this insta-reputation throughout the whole movie, murdering, Chinese-throwing-star-chucking and bazooka wielding her way to the end, while all the time calling her father (a weirdly well-cast Nicholas Cage) daddy, dressing in pink, wearing her hair in bunches and ending her day with cocoa and marshmallows. Whether in Hit-Girl costume or out of it, there could be no doubt as to the ‘hit’ side of things; in one of the most ironic ways possible, audiences were helplessly charmed by the murderous little lass.
As for Moretz herself, she grew up to become as beautiful as she was childhood-cute, and of course, has since made more adult film choices that are now expanding what was always a clear natural talent. But for those who remember when she was just 11 years old, that moment in which she silently pushed a sword through someone’s midriff and then growled a line including a word that even some adults still feel uncomfortable using, that will forever be the moment that Chloe Moretz well and truly arrived.