Joey King

Joey King was born on July 30, 1999, in Los Angeles, California. Her older sister Hunter King is also an actor. Joey began working on screen as a child, appearing in the 2007 drama Reign Over Me. Her breakthrough leading role came in Ramona and Beezus (2010), an adaptation of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. King played the imaginative Ramona Quimby opposite Selena Gomez as her older sister, Beatrice, nicknamed Beezus. The film placed King at the center of a story about a family coping with job loss and Ramona’s attempts to help.

Her subsequent films moved across genres. In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), she appeared as a young Talia al Ghul. She portrayed Christine Perron in the supernatural horror film The Conjuring (2013), and Emily Cale, the daughter of Channing Tatum’s character, in the action thriller White House Down (2013). King also voiced the China Girl in Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). In Wish Upon (2017), she played Clare Shannon, a teenager who discovers a music box that grants wishes at a terrible cost.

Netflix’s The Kissing Booth (2018) made King recognizable as Elle Evans, a high school student whose romance with Noah Flynn complicates her friendship with his brother Lee. Jacob Elordi played Noah, while Joel Courtney played Lee. King returned for The Kissing Booth 2 (2020) and The Kissing Booth 3 (2021). Between those sequels, she took a sharply different role in Hulu’s 2019 miniseries The Act. Playing Gypsy Rose Blanchard opposite Patricia Arquette as her mother, Dee Dee, King depicted a real case involving abuse, deception, and murder. Her performance earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for outstanding lead actress in a limited series or movie.

In the 2022 action film The Princess, King played a royal captive who fights to escape a forced marriage. That year she also appeared in Bullet Train as the Prince, a manipulative assassin whose nickname conceals her identity. She starred as Halina Kurc in the 2024 Hulu series We Were the Lucky Ones, adapted from Georgia Hunter’s novel about a Polish Jewish family separated during the Second World War. Her other 2024 projects included voicing Poppy Prescott in Despicable Me 4, portraying an assistant named Zara Ford in A Family Affair, and starring as Tally Youngblood in Netflix’s adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. King married director Steven Piet in 2023; they had worked together on The Act.