Aiden Longworth
Aiden Longworth is a Canadian actor who played the title role in The 9th Life of Louis Drax, the 2016 film directed by Alexandre Aja and adapted from Liz Jensen's 2004 novel. He was a child when the film was made. This page covers the screen work and nothing else, and it is short because the verifiable professional record is short.
What Aiden Longworth is known for
Aiden Longworth is known for one lead performance: Louis Drax, the 9 year old at the centre of Aja's film, a boy who spends most of the running time in a hospital bed in a coma while his voice carries a large part of the storytelling. It is an unusual first credit of any prominence, because the role is simultaneously the most important part in the film and the one with the least physical action available to it.
Aiden Longworth: the film, and what the part required
The film required something a child lead is very rarely asked for, which is a performance split into 2 incompatible halves. One half is voice: the narration that the novel gives to Louis in the first person, retained by the film as voice-over and delivered without the actor being able to use his body or face. The other half is stillness, since the character is unconscious for much of the present-day action, with the boy's earlier life reached through scenes set before the fall.
In Jensen's novel Louis narrates from inside the coma. The reader has continuous access to him, and he is one of 2 alternating first-person voices, so he holds roughly half the book.
The film keeps the narration as voice-over but builds its investigation around the adult characters, so the actor playing Louis carries the story audibly while the camera follows other people.
That division is the adaptation problem of the whole film reduced to a single casting decision. It is also the reason the part is worth noting in a reference about adaptation rather than in a career profile: the role exists in the shape it does because of what a novel can do with a first-person child narrator and a film cannot.
What the public record does and does not support
The public record supports the 2016 lead credit and little else that can be stated with confidence. No further credit is listed here, because none could be confirmed to the standard this reference applies to everything else on the site. A reference is more useful when it declines to fill a gap than when it guesses at one.
Why the child lead is the hardest casting problem in this kind of adaptation
The child lead is the hardest casting problem in this kind of adaptation because the novel's whole effect depends on a young voice being both charming and unreliable, and film has almost no way to hold those 2 qualities at once. Prose lets a reader enjoy a child narrator and simultaneously notice what he is leaving out. A camera tends to resolve the tension in favour of sympathy. The comparison case is Room (2015), where the film committed its entire visual grammar to a 5 year old's point of view and kept the effect. The 9th Life of Louis Drax made the opposite choice, keeping the voice and giving the camera to the adults, and the distance the film travels from the novel on this site's four-point scale is largest on exactly that axis.