#Bella Ramsey on Being a Child Actor: “The Thing I Hated the Most Was Being Patronized”

Bella Ramsey is opening up about the struggles they faced as a child actor in Hollywood.

The Last of Us star told The Independent, in an interview shared online Saturday, that they “didn’t like the separation” they noticed between kids and adult performers.

“The thing I hated the most was being patronized,” Ramsey explained. “I didn’t like the fact that I could only be on set for a certain amount of time, and had to go and do tutoring. I get why the hours protections for child actors are phenomenally important – but I hated feeling like I was lesser or separate from the adult cast.”

Though Ramsey turned 20 years old earlier this year, they still find themselves cast as younger teens in projects, including as Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, Birdy in Catherine Called Birdy and Ellie Williams in The Last of Us, opposite Pedro Pascal.

Ramsey admitted that they always “got along better” with adults when they were younger. Especially since they spent a lot of time on film sets after they left school at age 12 to take online classes instead.

“I wasn’t intimidated by going onto a set with a load of people twice, three times my age,” Ramsey said. “As I’ve grown up, I’ve learnt that I have autonomy to stand up for myself and for other younger people that I work with now. I want to enable them to advocate for themselves in the way that people older than me taught me to advocate for myself!”

Ramsey isn’t the only actor to open up about their challenges of working as a child star. Last month, Jenna Ortega shared that it was “really hard” being a Hispanic child actress in the industry.

“As a child actor, there are two jobs that you can get: you’re either the younger version of someone or you’re playing somebody’s daughter — and there were just not many leading Hispanic actors who I could be that for,” explained Ortega, who was born to parents of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent. “So a lot of the jobs that I was going for growing up would never work out, because I didn’t look [a certain] way. That was really hard, to hear that something you couldn’t change was what was preventing you [from succeeding].”