Austin Abrams is an American actor known for playing Ethan Daley in Euphoria, Ron Anderson in The Walking Dead, and the lead role of Dash in Dash & Lily. Born on September 2, 1996, in Sarasota, Florida, he has spent more than a decade building a career on subtle, character-driven performances across both television and film.
His path to Hollywood started early. What follows traces that path, from a childhood theater kid in Florida to a working actor now headlining major studio releases in 2026, along with the film and television roles that built his reputation along the way.
Early Life and Background
Abrams grew up in Sarasota, Florida, the son of Lori and Bradley Abrams, who are both doctors. He is of Jewish heritage, a detail that has come up in interviews about his upbringing and family life.
He started taking acting lessons at age five and moved into theater productions by age nine. That early stage training shows up in his screen work, which tends to favor restraint over showiness, even in roles built around teenage angst or crisis.
The Sarasota Film Festival later gave him his first individual acting award for a film shot years after he’d already left home to work, tying his origin story directly to a moment of professional recognition.
How Austin Abrams Got His Start in Acting
Abrams made his feature film debut in the 2011 thriller Ticking Clock. A year later, he took a recurring role as Todd Cooper on the MTV sitcom The Inbetweeners, his first sustained television work.
The bigger break came in 2013, a year that gave him two notable film credits: Gangster Squad, where he played Pete, and The Kings of Summer, an indie coming-of-age comedy in which he played Aaron. The Kings of Summer in particular circulated widely on the festival and streaming circuit and put him in front of a wider audience for the first time.
Two years later, he took the role of Ben Starling in Paper Towns (2015), the film adaptation of John Green’s novel. It was a small part in a movie built around bigger names, but it kept him working steadily in projects aimed at a teen and young-adult audience, which shaped the next phase of his career.
That run of young-adult adjacent work in the mid-2010s matters more than it might look on paper. It put Abrams in front of casting directors who worked in that lane repeatedly, and it’s a large part of why the roles that followed, on The Walking Dead, This Is Us, and eventually Euphoria, fell within a similar age range and tone.
Breakout Roles: The Walking Dead, This Is Us, and Euphoria
Between 2015 and 2016, Abrams played Ron Anderson in the fifth and sixth seasons of The Walking Dead, one of the most-watched drama series on American television at the time. The role gave him his first extended run on a major cable series and a level of visibility his earlier film work hadn’t reached.
He followed that with a recurring part as a young version of Marc McKeon on This Is Us between 2019 and 2021, a smaller but steady presence on another high-profile network drama.
The role that changed his career trajectory most was Ethan Daley on HBO’s Euphoria, which he played from 2019 through the second season in 2022. Euphoria became a cultural touchstone for its depiction of teenage life, and Ethan was one of the more grounded, quietly comic characters in an ensemble known for its intensity. The part introduced him to a much larger, younger audience and is still the role most viewers associate with his name.
That same period, he took on his first true leading role, playing Dash in the 2020 Netflix series Dash & Lily, a romantic comedy built around two teenagers exchanging messages through a shared notebook across New York City. Carrying a series as the male lead, rather than working within a large ensemble, was a different kind of challenge than his previous television roles, and it came at a point in his career when he had already spent close to a decade building smaller parts.
Taken together, these three shows, The Walking Dead, This Is Us, and Euphoria, cover almost the entire range of American prestige and genre television within a single actor’s résumé: horror-adjacent drama, family drama, and teen psychological drama. Few actors his age moved across that much tonal ground on television in the same five-year window.
Austin Abrams Movies: From Indie Roles to Studio Films
1. Early Film Work
Through the mid-to-late 2010s, Abrams built a résumé heavy on independent and mid-budget films rather than blockbusters. Brad’s Status (2017), a comedy-drama starring Ben Stiller, cast him as Troy Sloan. The same year, he appeared in Tragedy Girls, We Don’t Belong Here, and All Summers End, three smaller films that let him stretch into darker, more offbeat characters than his television work allowed.
In 2018, he took roles in Dude and Puzzle, and in 2019 he played Tommy Milner in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a horror film produced by Guillermo del Toro that performed well at the box office and gave him another mainstream credit. That project stands out on his résumé because it was a genuine studio release with wide theatrical distribution, not an indie festival title, and it showed he could hold a supporting part in a film built for a much larger opening weekend than the movies he’d worked on before.
He played Henry Page in Chemical Hearts (2020), a young-adult drama released on Amazon, continuing the pattern of teen-focused film work that ran parallel to his television roles during those years. By this point in his career, the overlap between his film and television work had become obvious: nearly every project cast him as a teenager or young adult navigating some version of a coming-of-age story, whether the genre was horror, drama, or comedy.
2. Recent Films
His film work has shifted toward bigger productions and more varied genres in recent years. In Do Revenge (2022), a dark teen comedy for Netflix, he played Max Broussard. He then took two roles in 2023 that leaned more dramatic: Ben Taylor in The Starling Girl and Gettys O’Brien in The Line, a coming-of-age drama set against college fraternity culture.
The Line brought him his first individual acting award, the Rising Star Award at the Sarasota Film Festival, held in the city where he grew up.
In 2024, he appeared in Wolfs, an action comedy starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, playing a character credited simply as Kid. Sharing a cast with two of the most established leading men in American film marked a clear step up in production scale from the festival dramas that had defined much of his prior work.
His momentum continued into 2025 with a role in Weapons, playing James, and 2026 brought two of his most prominent film credits yet: Resident Evil, in which he plays Bryan, and Whalefall. Both projects position him in larger studio productions than most of his earlier career, and both arrive in the same year, giving him back-to-back major theatrical releases rather than the more scattered release pattern of his earlier films.
Austin Abrams TV Shows Worth Watching
For viewers who know him mainly from film, his television catalog is arguably where his most consistent work lives. The Walking Dead gave him a multi-season arc on a series with a large, dedicated fan base. This Is Us put him in a much quieter, family-drama register. Euphoria remains his highest-profile TV credit and the role most closely tied to his public image. Dash & Lily gave him his first lead, carrying an entire series rather than supporting an ensemble.
Together, these four shows track a clear arc: supporting ensemble player, to recurring dramatic presence, to lead. It’s a progression that mirrors his film career, where his parts have grown from small festival roles to studio leads over the same stretch of years.
For anyone catching up on his catalog, Euphoria is the natural starting point given its cultural reach, but The Walking Dead and This Is Us both show a different, quieter side of his range that the Euphoria role doesn’t fully capture. Watching all four in sequence gives a clearer picture of his range than any single credit does on its own.
Awards and Recognition
Abrams’ most notable individual recognition to date is the Rising Star Award he received at the Sarasota Film Festival for The Line (2023). The award carries particular weight given where it was presented: Sarasota is the city he grew up in, so the recognition came from an audience and a festival tied directly to his own background rather than a purely industry setting.
Several of the ensemble shows he has appeared in, including The Walking Dead and Euphoria, have collected industry awards and nominations as productions, though those recognitions belong to the shows and their broader casts rather than to Abrams individually. As his lead and near-lead roles in film continue to grow, from Wolfs through Weapons, Resident Evil, and Whalefall, individual recognition tied specifically to his own performances is likely to follow at a similar pace.
Personal Life
Abrams was raised in Sarasota, Florida, by two parents who both work as doctors. He has spoken about his Jewish heritage as part of his upbringing. Outside of confirmed biographical details like these, he has kept most of his personal life out of the press, focusing public attention on his film and television work rather than his life off camera.
That approach sets him apart from several actors who came up through the same wave of 2010s teen dramas and young-adult adaptations, several of whom built a public profile around their personal lives alongside their acting careers. Abrams’ public footprint stays almost entirely tied to his projects, which makes his filmography, rather than interviews or personal appearances, the most reliable source for understanding his career.
What’s Next for Austin Abrams
With Resident Evil and Whalefall both set for 2026, Abrams is moving into projects with considerably larger budgets and audiences than most of his earlier film work. Combined with his ongoing television legacy from Euphoria and The Walking Dead, his 2026 slate marks the point where his career shifts from steady character actor to a more visible leading presence in studio filmmaking.
Given the pace of his output over the past few years, roughly a film or major television project every year since 2020, there’s little reason to expect that pace to slow down. For a searcher trying to track his career going forward, his upcoming film credits are the clearest signal of where his career is headed next, more than any single past role.
