2025 has been a whirlwind for Aidan Delbis, the 19-year-old Southern California actor suddenly thrust into the spotlight after making his film debut in Bugonia, opposite Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons in Yorgos Lanthimos’s conspiracy thriller. Cast right before his 18th birthday, Delbis, who is on the autism spectrum, got his start in high school productions of Dracula and Almost, Maine, and as a cast member of The Miracle Project, an LA-based inclusive program for theater and film. One might assume that being plucked from relative obscurity to the big screen would be a jarring or unmooring experience, but Delbis approaches his newfound success with a steady, confident ease.
“I don't know exactly how I feel about a lot of how things have happened. It's certainly exciting and interesting,” Delbis tells Teen Vogue via Zoom from his family home in an LA suburb, his cat Oreo on his lap. “I'm probably experiencing a bunch of emotions that I likely haven't totally processed yet.”
In Bugonia Delbis plays Don, the quiet, earnest, and sweet autistic cousin to Plemons’s character, Teddy. The duo is bound by blood and an important mission — one that makes more sense to Teddy than Don. The cousins kidnap girlboss CEO Michelle, played by Emma Stone, whom they believe is an alien out to destroy humanity. Don becomes the emotional anchor of Bugonia’s bleak, violent narrative, offering a human counterbalance to Michelle and Teddy’s escalating ideological fury.
“Don has the most fresh and more unbiased perspective of them all and often the most pure,” Delbis says. Don has a “natural sense of empathy,” which offsets Teddy’s prickly demeanor, and makes the audience “less likely to brush [Teddy] off as a complete nutcase,” as Delbis puts it. And based on the screening I saw, people fall for Don instantly—he’s a fan favorite from the jump.
The young actor identifies with Don in some ways: “I can be fairly quiet and awkward in my own right, albeit maybe not as much so.” But Delbis says that he’s not as much of a pushover, and would have rebelled a bit against his tyrannical cousin if he was in the same position; he admits he’s got a bit of a rebellious streak. “There's something about [Don’s] struggles that I think felt familiar to me,” Delbis says. “In school I experienced some pretty similar feelings. High school math and chemistry classes were very confusing and rough for me.” Delbis’s connection to Don isn’t just about their similar struggles, and shared awkwardness—his personal interpretation of the film is shaped by the same empathy and optimism that makes his character so loveable.
Like most Yorgos Lanthimos films, Bugonia is quite dark and nihilistic in some respects, but Delbis dug out the softer core of the movie: perhaps we as a society are too harsh on those who think about the world in their own unique ways. “The world has not always been kind or open-minded towards neurodivergent people,” he says.
He is careful not to overstate the impact of his autism in his professional and artistic life, and he only really talks about it when it's brought up in interviews. Delbis clarifies that he finds it amusing more than annoying or intrusive, but he does struggle a bit to answer those particular types of questions. “I didn't think about [my autism] much while working on the film,” he says. “I also don't think I'm really quite as conscious in general how being autistic even impacts [my work.]”
But Delbis does have an opinion about the representation of neurodivergence in film. Although Don was not originally conceived as an autistic character, the film does not explicitly label or call attention to neurodivergence, allowing it to exist simply as an aspect of his character and not a defining trait.which Delbis says he “finds preferable over it being drudged up too often, or the characters being treated as more of a stereotype of autistic or neurodivergent people.” As is the case for both the character he portrays and in his own life, he is not defined by a diagnosis; it's part of his story but not the whole thing. Delbis above all doesn’t want to be pigeonholed to only playing autistic characters simply because he is on the spectrum.
True to that outlook, his autism wasn’t something he thought about much on set either. When he talks about any difficulties during filming it's more about being uncomfortable running around in a “hot AF” oversized suit than anything related to his autism. “I was worried that one of Emma's heels might end up smacking me on the head,” he chuckles, reminiscing on filming the kidnapping scene in the movie. But that same stretch of filming also holds one of his favorite memories. Right after the abduction scene, Teddy and Don share a small, goofy celebration—a rare pause in the film’s chaotic pace—and Delbis lights up describing how much fun it was to play that moment with Plemons.
A debut as high profile as Bugonia would be cause for loud celebration for many, but Delbis holds his success differently, a calm, private satisfaction, far from boastful. In the short time since the wide release of the film and this interview, Delbis says he hasn’t heard too much feedback from his friends, though one of his pals from high school told him, “that sh*t was bananas.” And he has enjoyed watching audiences' reactions to a very particular part of the film towards the end, but he doesn’t want to give any spoilers—you’ll have to watch to find out.
With the film receiving a recent Golden Globes nomination it doesn’t seem like his Hollywood rollercoaster is slowing down anytime soon. And while he is still processing this magical experience, he does seem sure of one thing: “I think [filming Bugonia] made me want to stick with doing acting stuff for the foreseeable future and perhaps to even try and make a career out of it.”
In the meantime, his newfound spotlight hasn’t changed his day-to-day life very much. He’s still a teenager who enjoys playing basketball, listening to Green Day (a bit of a callback if you’ve seen the film), and watching Youtube videos (one of his favorite pastimes). That’s not to say he’s not thinking about his next moves.
“I think that my main goal as an actor at the moment, it's just to keep on doing interesting things,” he says. “Be able to do roles that are not boring. Whatever the scale of them may be.”
And judging from his personal taste—he names Jack Nicholson and Vincent Price among his favorite actors (though he says that he’s now a “die-hard” Jesse Plemons fan)—it's highly unlikely Delbis will take on anything too boring. It’s his interest in character-driven performances that got him the role to begin with. He submitted a video of himself performing Price’s monologue from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video, which caught the eye of the Bugonia casting director.
Delbis is not just obsessed with the spooky camp of Price, he’s an avid horror fan who cites A Nightmare on Elm Street as one of his all-time favorites, and he’d love the chance to play a movie monster someday. It would be wish fulfillment, since he missed his chance to play Dracula in his high school production. “I definitely think it would make my inner teenager very happy to get to play Dracula or some other vampire figure in a project one of these days,” he says. “Fingers crossed.” Consider this your notice, Hollywood: Aidan Delbis is ready when you are.
