Michael Bahr, education director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, remembers when he encountered “this dynamic, charismatic, this kind of human dynamo called Riley Griffiths in this first-grade play.”
Bahr was working with Debra Harding’s class at Cedar City’s North Elementary as they performed a scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — “a pretty lofty task,” he said — and Riley was portraying the comic character Bottom.
“He had a lot of energy,” recalled Harding, who now teaches at Three Peaks Elementary in Cedar City.
Two years later, the apple-cheeked Riley got his first professional acting gig, playing Robin in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at the 2006 Utah Shakespeare Festival.
Riley is 14 now, and the world is getting a first glimpse of this talented young actor in one of the summer’s most anticipated movies, the thriller “Super 8.”
If Riley has anything to say about it, this role won’t be his last. “Acting’s definitely what I want to do for the rest of my life,” he said in a phone interview.
“Dude, that’s Steven Spielberg” » In “Super 8,” Griffiths plays Charles, a middle-schooler in an Ohio steel town in 1979 who is directing a zombie movie, filming on his Super 8 camera with friends as cast and crew. One night, while shooting a scene on a train platform, he and his pals witness a horrific train derailment — and, in the chaos, Charles’ camera captures images of something mysterious escaping from an Air Force freight car.
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