Joey King: Biography, The Act, Uglies and Filmography

Different ways to find a voice

Joey King was born in Los Angeles on 30 July 1999. She was working on screen from childhood, and Ramona and Beezus (2010), with Selena Gomez, gave her a central place in a family story built around a child’s unruly imagination. The studio’s description emphasizes Ramona’s mishaps and inventiveness. King’s energetic reactions fit that scale: a small embarrassment can feel like an enormous crisis when the story stays close to a young character’s point of view.

As Elle Evans in The Kissing Booth, King became the center of a romantic-comedy trilogy released in 2018, 2020 and 2021. Elle’s romance with Noah Flynn, played by Jacob Elordi, complicates her friendship with his brother Lee, played by Joel Courtney. The role calls for quick shifts between romantic anticipation and social embarrassment. King also executive produced the second and third films, an important distinction when tracing how her responsibilities expanded beyond performing a recurring character.

The Act (2019) asks for a different relationship with the audience. King plays Gypsy Rose Blanchard opposite Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee, in a dramatization co-created by Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean. The story follows a daughter trying to escape a controlling relationship with her mother. King has to make dependence and the desire for independence coexist within a scene. Her work received a 2019 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie. The series is a dramatization, so its scenes should not be treated as documentary evidence about the real people.

Uglies (2024) brings acting and producing together again. King stars as Tally Youngblood and executive produces McG’s adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s novel. Netflix’s account describes her long-standing attachment to the book and her involvement in getting the film made. In its future society, cosmetic transformation is an expectation imposed on teenagers. Tally’s changing relationship with that promise gives King a path from eagerness to doubt. It also places a familiar concern from her earlier roles in a science-fiction setting: the difficulty of deciding what to want while other people define the choices.