Austin Abrams: The Resident Evil Star's 6 Essential Roles (And 1 To Look Out For)
With Zack Cregger’s Resident Evil clawing its blood-splattered, organ-strewn way to $108M at the box-office in its opening weekend, Austin Abrams can currently claim to be the sole star (many-limbed monsters aside) of the biggest movie in the world. Not bad for an actor who just turned 30 and who many cinema-goers are only really getting to know.
For Abrams, who started acting in his mid-teens, this kind of leveling-up would have seemed hard to imagine only a couple of years ago. The actor got his first break on the short-lived American remake of The Inbetweeners before moving into features with Gangster Squad in 2013. From there came a decade of work on indie movies (mostly playing best friend or supporting roles) before his turn as Ethan in Euphoria put him on the map in a different way. At some point along that journey, an up and coming horror filmmaker named Zach Cregger took note and decided to cast him as an affable junky in Weapons before handing him a starring role as an unlikely action hero in Resident Evil.
With Whalefall set for release in mid-October, there’s every chance Abrams will make it two hit movies in a row. Indeed, if there's any justice in this world, future generations may look back on Fall 2026 as “Austin Autumn”. In the list below, which I’ve arranged in chronological order, you’ll find Abrams' six essential roles pre-Resident Evil as well as a little more info on his next hotly anticipated project.
With all the talent involved in the U.S. remake of The Inbetweeners (every episode was directed by Taika Waititi, who went on to make a little movie called What We Do in the Shadows when the show got canceled), it’s a shame that it didn’t quite click, but Abrams didn’t let it get him down.
That same year, the young actor landed his first movie role in Gangster Squad, a crime flick from Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer that featured everyone from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone to Sean Penn in its heavyweight cast. For this memorable big screen debut (think modern noirs like The Untouchables and LA Confidential), Abrams was cast as Pete, a charming shoeshine boy whose death inspires Gosling’s reckless cop to take down a criminal organisation.
Off the back of that high-end movie debut, Abrams started picking up some interesting roles, including in Jack Schreier’s Paper Towns — an indie coming-of-age tale that feels reminiscent of the kind of movies that were coming out of Sundance at that time (if you've seen Me and Earl and the Dying Girl you'll know what we mean).
The movie follows Nat Wolff’s Quentin Jacobson, a young man with an unrequited crush on his neighbour (a first lead role for Cara Delevingne) — who one day mysteriously disappears. Abrams plays Quentin's best friend, Ben, who helps him in his attempts to track her down.
In recent years, Schreier has gone on to direct multiple episodes of Lee Sung Jin’s Beef for Netflix while also writing and directing Thunderbolts* for the MCU. His next project is set to be a little movie called X-Men, so if you’re curious where it really all started for him, this early Abrams joint should be swiftly added to your watchlist.
If you’re a White Lotus fan looking to go a little deeper on Mike White’s career, 2017’s Brad’s Status is a bittersweet indie movie that never quite got the love it deserved.
The story centres on a son and father (played by Abrams and Ben Stiller) as they go on a tour of East Coast colleges — think that iconic Season 1 episode of the Sopranos, but with a lot more mid-life crisis vibes and a lot less killing.
Like his HBO series Enlightened, Brad’s Status is one of few projects that White both wrote and directed. It was also similarly under-appreciated and misunderstood upon release — which is all the more reason to seek it out.
If you’re more interested in exploring Austin’s career from a TV standpoint, you can see him pop up in everything from The Americans to the Netflix anthology Scary Stories We Tell in the Dark to his brief recurring role as Ron Anderson on The Walking Dead. But, of course, it was his performances as Ethan in the first two seasons of Euphoria that put the actor on the map in a whole different way.
For Season 1, Abrams got to play a lovable boyfriend to Barbie Ferreira’s Kat Hernandez but for Season 2, the writers brought him even more into the central narrative — leading to a dramatic break-up and a great turn in Lexi’s school play at the end of Season 2.
In the years since, a wide range of the show’s stars have gone on to remarkable careers and Abrams currently appears to be joining the elite tier of that graduating crop.
From Paper Towns and Euphoria came a number of roles in coming-of-age and YA dramas, including fine movies like The Starling Girl and The Line, but it was 2020’s Chemical Hearts which finally saw Abrams play the romantic lead for the first time.
The story follows a budding writer named Henry Page (Abrams) who falls in love with his co-editor at the school newspaper (played by Lili Reinhart). The movie, like so many from this genre, suffers from a serious case of what the kids call twee, but it’s worth seeing for these two actors.
As the name suggests, there's plenty of chemistry between them.
Ok, so maybe Wolfs — a movie directed by Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Jon Watts that featured Brad Pitt and George Clooney’s first team-up since the Ocean’s trilogy — never quite added up to the sum of its parts. It did, however, provide Abrams with an absolute plum role as the target of Clooney and Pitt’s jaded hitmen. It also allowed him to show his chops alongside two of the most famous actors of all time.
The movie, as that misspelled title suggests, is about as slick and half-hearted as one of Clooney’s Nespresso ads, but Abrams gives it a shot of adrenaline whenever he's on screen. If you’re looking to see a more recent example of what he's capable of, make sure to check out at least this remarkable two-minute monologue.
Cregger didn’t cast him in Weapons off the back of this performance alone, but it certainly can't have hurt.
In 2025, Abrams brought his shaggy dog charms to Cregger’s Weapons and would have walked away with the movie were it not for Amy Madigan’s Oscar-winning turn as Aunt Gladys — given that the movie stars Julia Garner, Josh Brolin and Benedict Wong, and given that his character stays in the margins for much of the first half, this is no mean feat.
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, Weapons is a wildly entertaining horror flick that focuses on a small town (shades of Stephen King) where an entire classroom of kids (bar one) go missing. Cregger tells the story over the course of a day or so and from multiple POV’s — first Garner’s world weary teacher, then Brolin’s mourning father, and later Abrams’ James, a homeless drug addict who accidentally lands himself in some heightened situations.
The character is one of an increasing number of not-great dudes who Abrams has played in his career so far: the kind of characters you can only root for if the actor playing them has a very specific kind of charisma — which Abrams seems to have in abundance.
Coming to theatres in October, Whalefall is the latest claustrophobic thrill ride from writer-director Brian Duffield — the filmmaker behind No One Will Save You, a near dialogue-free alien invasion movie starring Kaitlyn Dever from 2023. For his latest, Duffield has moved his interests from the stars to the ocean for a movie about a young diver (Abrams) who gets swallowed by a sperm whale and has to find a way to escape before his oxygen runs out.
If you enjoyed watching Abrams joke his way through increasingly deadly, scary and icky situations in Resident Evil, this movie appears to be offering up a similar bag of thrills. Abrams will be joined on screen by his Weapons co-star Josh Brolin in what might be the most terrifying IMAX release of the year — here's hoping.
