Liam Aiken

Liam Pádraic Aiken, born January 7, 1990, in New York, New York, is an American actor whose career spans stage, film, and television. The only child of Moya Aiken, an Irish-born artist, and Bill Aiken, an American MTV producer of Scots-Irish descent, Aiken lost his father to esophageal cancer in September 1992, when Bill Aiken was 34 years old and Liam was two. He grew up in New Jersey and completed his secondary education at Dwight-Englewood School in 2008, after which he enrolled at New York University to study film. As of 2017, he has been based in Los Angeles.

Aiken's earliest on-screen appearance came as an infant in a segment on Night After Night with Allan Havey, and his first professional work was a Ford Motor Company commercial for the Ford Aerostar. He made his stage debut on Broadway in 1997, appearing in A Doll's House at the age of seven. That same year marked his film debut in Henry Fool. His first major film role followed in Stepmom (1998), and he subsequently appeared in Road to Perdition (2002) and the family film Good Boy! (2003). During this period, Aiken was considered for the role of Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense (1999), a part that ultimately went to Haley Joel Osment, and was also considered for the role of Harry Potter, though J.K. Rowling's preference for a British actor led to Daniel Radcliffe being cast instead.

In 2004, Aiken took on the role of Klaus Baudelaire, a 12-year-old orphan, in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. His connection to that property extended further when, from 2012 to 2015, he narrated the audiobook versions of All the Wrong Questions, a prequel series to A Series of Unfortunate Events. He appeared in The Killer Inside Me in 2010 and joined the CBS series A Gifted Man in September 2011.

Aiken's film work continued with Nor'easter (2012), directed by Andrew Brotzman, in which he portrayed a boy who returns home after years of being missing. In 2014, he played the title role in Ned Rifle, the concluding film in a trilogy that began with Henry Fool and continued with Fay Grim (2006). He co-starred in The Bloodhound (2020), a mystery film drawing on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," and in 2021 appeared in Bashira, directed by Nickson Fong, playing an electronic musician experiencing a series of nightmares. That same year he played J.R. in Montauk, directed by Sean Nalaboff. His most recent film credit is V13 (2025).