Skyler Gisondo has the face of an open book. Maybe it’s the toothy grin, or maybe it’s his crystal clear blue eyes that squint whenever he smiles, wh
Skyler Gisondo has the face of an open book. Maybe it’s the toothy grin, or maybe it’s his crystal clear blue eyes that squint whenever he smiles, which is almost always. It might just be all the freckles. But, whatever the reason, it’s evident that Gisondo projects an almost impossible, Opie in The Andy Griffith Show level of earnestness that made him a natural as a child actor. “My first audition was a Pizza Hut commercial, which was a total cattle call,” Gisondo tells me. The odds were stacked against him as a Palm Beach County, Florida native with two ocean engineers for parents. “There were like a hundred kids there, and I got it.” His father assumed his son had been the victim of a scam. “He was like, ‘How much is this going to charge us?,’” Gisondo recalls. “We didn’t have any connective tissue to the film industry or anything, so my parents were unsure of what was going on.”
Still, with his SAG card in hand thanks to that Pizza Hut commercial his family relocated to Southern California to support his pursuit. But, perhaps due to their skepticism and vigorous distance from show business, Gisondo’s parents had very specific rules that shaped his career. “[My mom] wouldn’t let me audition for Disney or Nick because she didn’t want me to be kid famous or whatever,” he says. “I was this steadily working kid actor, but by no means a famous child actor.”
Without a Hannah Montana (Miley Cyrus), a Wizards of Waverly Place (Selena Gomez) or a Bizaardvark (Jake and Logan Paul) Disney Channel show to launch him to fame, Gisondo had to grind it out on the audition circuit as a kid. The grind worked for Gisondo: he was employed consistently as a kid, appearing in films like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Night at the Museum, and The Amazing Spider-Man movies to television shows like What I Like About You, Psych, and The Bill Engvall Show. Perhaps because he was able to avoid the pitfalls of childstardom, Gisondo was able to smoothly transition his career into juvenile adulthood in Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart (2019) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021), both of which he filmed before he turned 25. “Looking back, it really was this gradual thing,” he says, of his career.
Navigating the rocky road from precocious kid-commercial actor to an adult movie star isn’t uncomplicated, but Gisondo possesses a maturity and gravitas that belies his youthful appearance. It just so happens that combination was crucial in landing his most demanding role yet in Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s gritty drama that delves into the psyche of To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen.
In Primetime, Gisondo plays Dan Plumb, a 23-year-old aspiring actor in Los Angeles who, after the cringiest audition of all time, gets cast on To Catch A Predator as a decoy—a.k.a. an adult pretending to be a minor in order to lure potential sexual predators to cautious locations where Hansen (played by Robert Pattinson), a camera crew, and law enforcement are lying in wait.
“Part of the outlandishness of the show is these decoys did not seem remotely underage,” says Gisondo, of To Catch a Predator. “You could tell this is a guy in his early 20s, or a woman in her mid-twenties.” He credits the production design and costume designers for nailing the the aesthetic of the early 2000s—puka shell necklaces, board shorts, Billabong T-shirts, etc—for creating an environment where he could convincingly pull that off.
