Billy Barratt

Billy Barratt is an English actor whose breakthrough came through a performance rooted in a specific British criminal-justice story. In the BBC Two television film Responsible Child, first broadcast in December 2019, he played Ray, a twelve-year-old boy prosecuted for murder alongside his older brother after the pair kill their mother’s abusive partner. The drama follows Ray from police interviews through legal preparation and trial, using his case to question the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales. Barratt’s restrained portrayal made him the central figure in a production written by Sean Buckley and directed by Nick Holt.

In November 2020, Barratt won the International Emmy Award for Best Performance by an Actor for Responsible Child. He was thirteen when the award was announced, making him the youngest person to win that category. The achievement was particularly notable because the role demanded that he carry a severe courtroom drama rather than a child-focused adventure, and because the International Emmy competition recognizes television produced outside the United States.

Barratt later took a prominent role in Apple TV+’s science-fiction series Invasion. He plays Caspar Morrow, a London schoolboy living with epilepsy who appears to share an unusual connection with the invading extraterrestrials. Caspar’s neurological episodes, his sketchbook, and his relationship with classmate Jamila Huston become important to the series’ unfolding mystery. He appeared in the first season, released in 2021, and returned as the story expanded in season two in 2023.

His screen work also includes Disney’s 2023 lunar adventure Crater. Barratt plays Dylan, one of the young friends who joins Caleb Channing on a rover journey across a moon-mining colony before Caleb is due to leave for another planet. The ensemble also includes Isaiah Russell-Bailey, Mckenna Grace, Orson Hong, and Thomas Boyce. Unlike the bleak realism of Responsible Child, Crater gave Barratt a role in a coming-of-age science-fiction story built around friendship, grief, and exploration.

Barratt has also appeared in the 2018 film Mary Poppins Returns and in television projects including Mr Selfridge and The White Princess. His credits therefore span period drama, fantasy, contemporary legal drama, and large-scale science fiction. Nevertheless, Responsible Child remains the defining early work of his career: it supplied both an unusually demanding lead role and a record-setting international award while he was still in his early teens. It established Barratt as a young performer recognized not merely nationally, but by an international television academy.