The marquee names on Buddy belong to Keegan-Michael Key, Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt, but the film that Roadside Attractions and Saban Films send into wide release on August 28 rests almost entirely on the shoulders of a group of performers young enough to still be doing schoolwork between takes.
Casper Kelly’s feature directorial debut, which premiered in the Midnight section at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22, drops viewers into 1999 and into the studio of a children’s television program called It’s Buddy! The show is hosted by a relentlessly cheerful orange unicorn, and the children who populate it have no memory of how they got there. When one of them disappears, the rest begin to push back against their host, and Buddy sends them off toward a mythical place called Diamond City. Running parallel to all of this is Milioti as Grace, a suburban mother whose own life starts bending toward whatever Buddy actually is.
Delaney Quinn plays Freddy, the girl at the center of the revolt, and the distributors put her name in the announcement alongside Key and Milioti when they picked up North American rights, which is not a courtesy studios extend to child performers by default. Critics coming out of Park City backed the billing up. Collider’s review called the entire group of kid characters fantastic, and credited Quinn with handling a demanding shift “from the playful cast of a children’s show to fighting for her life and potentially becoming a final girl.”
Quinn already had a busy stretch behind her when Deadline reported her casting in early August of last year. She appeared in The Beanie Bubble and on Power Book III: Raising Kanan, played Louisa Adams in Mystic Christmas, and turned up in both The Roses and the Rose Byrne drama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Buddy is her first time carrying a film.
The rest of the young ensemble is worth knowing too. Madison Polan, who plays Hannah, is already a familiar voice to families even if her face is not familiar yet, having voiced Agnes in Despicable Me 4. Luke Speakman, cast here as Josh, started young enough to have appeared in the Apple TV+ revival of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories at five, and has since worked on The Invisible Raptor opposite Sean Astin and on Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Bryson JonSteele plays Derek and arrives with a run of independent features behind him, among them Those Who Walk Away and A View to Kill For. Rounding out the group are Seamus Flynn as Timothy, Tristan Borders as Oliver, Caleb Williams as Wade and Tory J. Malone as Tyler.
The ensemble spent the summer of 2025 filming in Northeast Ohio, with production setting up in Brooklyn, Solon and Burton beginning in July. BoulderLight Pictures and Low Spark Films produced, from a screenplay Kelly wrote with Jamie King. Kelly is best known for Too Many Cooks, the Adult Swim short that turned a sitcom title sequence into eleven minutes of escalating dread and has been passed around online for more than a decade since. Buddy is a considerable scaling up of that instinct, and Kelly has been clear about how he wants it seen, saying that “the theatrical experience means so much to me personally, and I made BUDDY to be experienced in a theater.”
The title character is a two person creation. Sergey Zhuravsky performs Buddy on set in the suit, with Key supplying the voice, while Shannon appears as both Charlie the Train and a ventriloquist doll named Willie, and Oswalt voices a backpack called Strappy. Clint Howard also turns up in the supporting cast.
Reviews out of Sundance were strong, with better than eight in ten critics registering positive on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic average landing in generally favorable territory, and much of that praise circled back to how convincingly the young cast sells a scenario that could easily have collapsed into camp. Holding a film like this together is real work, and all eight of them share the load. A wide release puts that work in front of a far bigger audience than a Midnight premiere could, and it will be worth following where each of them goes from here.