Zane Pais Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Zane Pais was thirteen when Margot at the Wedding was shot in fall 2006 — making the film his feature debut. He had been a working child actor on the New York stage and in television, but Claude is the role that introduced him to film audiences and the role most often pointed to in retrospective accounts of the picture.
Claude as the film's quiet center
Claude is on screen for nearly the full runtime. He observes more than he speaks. The role asks Pais to register what his mother is doing without yet having the vocabulary or the authority to name it — to absorb a series of small humiliations (the tree-climb mockery, the slippers conversation, the bus stop) without performing his hurt for the audience. He gets the film's last spoken lines: "Did you see me running out there?" "Yeah." "That was a lot of running." "I'm out of breath." Pais delivers them on a moving bus, winded and small, and the scene closes the film. See The Closing Bus Sequence.
"The boy, Zane Pais, is a discovery. He has the face of a child who is paying attention, and that is harder to find than it sounds." — A.O. Scott, paraphrased from New York Times end-of-year coverage (2007)
Roger Ebert was equally direct:
"The boy is played by Zane Pais with a quiet intelligence that suggests he has been observing all of this for some time." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2007)
A subsequent stage and television career
After Margot Pais worked on the New York stage and in independent film through his late teens and early twenties, including roles in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) and a number of off-Broadway productions. He has not pursued the steady film leading-man track that early child performances sometimes produce; the Margot role remains the work his name is most associated with. (imdb)
Working with Kidman and Baumbach
Pais was directed by Baumbach and acted opposite an Oscar-winning Nicole Kidman across most of his scenes. Baumbach has said in subsequent interviews that he wanted a child actor who would not "perform childhood," and Pais's natural reserve fit that brief. Several scenes — including the bedroom conversation in which Margot allows Claude to sleep in her bed "just for tonight" with a pillow between them,b19 and the bus-stop sequenceb41 b42 — required him to play long beats of stillness opposite Kidman's louder performance, and the film's structure depends on his holding that ground.