Scarlett Hazen is a young American actress from Syracuse, Utah, who turned a four-year-old’s spontaneous decision into a thriving multi-genre film career. She broke through with Love, Kennedy in 2017 and hasn’t slowed down since. From faith-based dramas to cult-driven home invasion thrillers, her filmography reads like a deliberate experiment in range. Her brother Manning acts alongside her, and her background as an All-Star Cheer athlete adds an unusual physicality to her screen presence. She’s quietly building one of the most interesting resumes in the indie film world today.
Key Takeaways
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Scarlett Hazen |
| Hometown | Syracuse, Utah, USA |
| Known For | Love, Kennedy, Love in Aruba, Escape from Germany |
| Sibling | Manning Hazen (actor) |
| Breakthrough Role | Young Kennedy in Love, Kennedy (2017) |
| Notable Genre Range | Faith drama, thriller, biographical documentary |
| Athletic Background | All-Star Cheer (flyer position) |
| Latest Project | Standout: The Ben Kjar Story (2025) |
| Private Life | Deliberately low public profile |
Why Did a Community Theater Production of ‘Oliver’ Trigger Her Ambition?
Most kids at four years old have bigger concerns than career planning. Snack preferences. Bedtime negotiations. Whether the dog is actually their best friend. Scarlett Hazen had other ideas entirely. Sitting in the audience of a local community theater production of Oliver, she didn’t fidget or lose interest. She watched. She calculated. Somewhere in that seat, a decision locked permanently into place.
She decided to act at age four — not because she craved fame, but because she saw local performers on a stage and knew she belonged up there too. That distinction matters far more than it sounds. A child drawn to the spotlight by vanity usually burns out fast. But a child who watches a performance and thinks about execution? That’s a completely different creature.
What’s genuinely striking about this origin story is its radical ordinariness. This isn’t your typical Los Angeles story about stage parents with headshots in their purses. This is Syracuse, Utah, a girl who treats acting less like a lottery ticket and more like a blue-collar trade. No glossy talent agencies showed up at a playground. No dramatic audition montage. Just a little girl who saw something, wanted in, and immediately started doing something about it.
She followed that instinct with real action, beginning acting and singing lessons shortly afterward. The discipline she demonstrated at that age hints at the work ethic that would later define everything about her professional habits. Athletes commit to a sport by age five all the time. Scarlett is committed to storytelling. And unlike most four-year-olds who declare a grand ambition over breakfast and forget it entirely by lunch, she followed through. That’s the detail people overlook when they talk about young actors. The spark matters, but what you do the morning after the spark is everything.
How Did ‘Love, Kennedy’ Define Her Career at Just Five Years Old?
Landing a role in a film isn’t the same thing as landing the right role. Plenty of young actors pick up forgettable parts in forgettable projects and then disappear without a trace. Scarlett’s first significant screen credit was neither forgettable nor low-stakes. Landing the role of Young Kennedy in Love, Kennedy wasn’t just good fortune — it was a genuinely heavy dramatic lift for a five-year-old.
Love, Kennedy is a 2017 American biographical drama film directed by T.C. Christensen for Angel Studios. It’s based on the true story of Kennedy Hansen, a Utah teenager diagnosed with terminal Juvenile Batten Disease who died at age 16 in 2014. This wasn’t light afternoon entertainment. The film deals with progressive neurological decline, family grief, and the quiet devastation of watching someone you love disappear. Heavy material for adult actors, let alone a kindergartener.
Scarlett portrayed Young Kennedy in the film’s early scenes, covering the child actress’s depiction of Kennedy’s initial experiences with the disease and setting the emotional foundation for the story’s entire progression. Think about that responsibility for a moment. She wasn’t playing a background character or a cute kid in a park scene. She was carrying the emotional tone of the film’s opening arc. Get those childhood scenes wrong, and the audience never connects with the story at all. She got them exactly right.
The film holds an audience score of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, with viewers frequently highlighting its profound emotional impact. A meaningful portion of that connection depends on the early scenes Scarlett anchored. The film did precisely what it needed to — it made people cry, it made them believe, and it launched a young actress into a serious conversation about dramatic talent in Utah’s growing independent film circuit. Not bad for a five-year-old on her first major credit.
Can One Actress Really Handle Both Faith Films and Home Invasion Thrillers?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is Scarlett Hazen’s entire filmography.
Most young actors build a personal brand early and stick to it hard. You’re the faith film kid or the genre kid, and your agent books you accordingly. Scarlett skipped that memo entirely. She bounces between spiritually driven biographical dramas and genuinely intense home invasion thrillers without missing a single beat — and she brings the same level of commitment to a scene about prayer as she does to a scene about hiding from intruders.
Babysitter Must Die (2020) follows armed cultists who invade a family’s home, and their babysitter fights back to survive. Scarlett played Sophia Castillo in the film. The tone is campy, tense, and survival-driven — a completely different emotional world from Love, Kennedy‘s quiet spiritual grief. That kind of versatility is usually reserved for character actors in their forties, not teenagers still building a resume from scratch.
Then consider The Fighting Preacher (2019), a biographical LDS-themed period piece, alongside Love in Aruba (2021), a lighter romantic drama. Each project sits in a different emotional register. Each one demands a completely different internal compass from the actor playing it. Scarlett moves between them with a fluidity that suggests she isn’t playing genre at all — she’s playing people. Genre is simply the packaging. The human truth inside every scene is what she consistently locks onto.
From The Fighting Preacher to Babysitter Must Die, she covers every base available to her. That’s not accidental. That’s a strategic, instinct-driven approach to career building that most industry veterans would openly applaud. She isn’t limiting herself to comfortable territory. She’s deliberately stress-testing herself across every genre she can find. And so far, every single test she’s taken, she has passed with something to spare.
What is the Deal with the Hazen Sibling Dynasty?
Talent tends to run in packs. History is full of sibling acts in entertainment — the Baldwins, the Fannings, the Ryans. Now, Utah quietly has the Hazens. Scarlett’s younger brother, Manning Hazen, is also an actor, and while he’s still building his own resume, the two of them together are becoming a genuinely recognizable presence in the Utah indie film world.
She has three brothers in total, which adds another layer to the family dynamic at home. But Manning’s parallel acting career is the real headline here. They likely share representation and almost certainly share the kind of dinner table conversation that most households simply don’t have — swapping audition notes, running lines for completely different projects, and debriefing about the specific exhaustion that comes from a twelve-hour production day.
Having a sibling who genuinely understands what you do for a living must be a remarkable advantage. When Scarlett finishes a grueling day on set, she doesn’t have to translate the experience for Manning. He already knows. That shared professional language builds a support system that keeps both of them grounded in an industry specifically designed to destabilize young people who haven’t yet figured out who they are.
Two kids from the same household, both pursuing the same demanding craft, both carving out space in a regional film scene that consistently punches well above its weight class — that’s not a coincidence. That’s a culture built deliberately inside a family. The Hazen name is becoming something in Utah independent film circles. And the interesting part is that neither sibling seems to be rushing it. They’re building steadily, project by project, the way people build things meant to actually last.
Why Was Her Role in ‘Escape from Germany’ a Career Turning Point?
Every actor has a moment where the work shifts from promising to purposeful. For Scarlett Hazen, Escape from Germany (2024) looks very much like that pivot. She played Carol Wood — a real, named, historically documented person — which raises the stakes of performance considerably beyond any fictional role she’d taken before.
The director is T.C. Christensen, the same filmmaker who gave her Love, Kennedy back in 2017. That repeated collaboration speaks volumes. Directors don’t bring actors back out of sentiment. They bring actors back because those actors delivered something irreplaceable the first time. Christensen clearly trusts Scarlett with real material about real people, and that professional trust is one of the most valuable currencies a young actress can earn.
Playing a real, named individual in a biographical film carries a weight that purely invented characters simply don’t. You’re accountable not just to the script but to the actual person who lived that life. You have to research, find the emotional core of a real human experience, and honor it on screen without flattening it into something shallow or unrecognizable. That’s a significant ask of a young actress. The fact that she took the role and delivered it demonstrates an appetite for the harder challenge rather than the comfortable one.
Escape from Germany sits alongside Love Switch (2024) as part of a noticeably busy year that signals her deliberate transition into more complex and narratively mature storytelling. She isn’t coasting on the goodwill of earlier credits. She isn’t playing it safe with easy material designed to keep her visible without demanding much. She’s climbing deliberately, choosing roles that require more from her each time, and that intentionality is exactly what separates the actors who make the transition successfully from the ones who don’t.
Does Being a Cheerleader Actually Help Her Acting?
It sounds like a throwaway biographical detail at first glance. Oh, she does cheer — how sweet. But sit with it for a moment, because the reality is considerably more interesting than the cliché. She competed in All-Star Cheer and held the specific position of flyer — the person launched into the air by teammates, performing mid-air stunts that demand total body control, explosive physical precision, and absolute trust in the people surrounding you. That isn’t pom-poms and spirit fingers. That’s serious athleticism.
Her cheer background gives her a meaningful edge in physically demanding roles because she brings a physical discipline to a film set that most young actors genuinely lack. Think about what a competitive flyer actually develops over years of training: balance, spatial awareness, explosive muscle control, the ability to commit completely to a physical action even when the outcome feels uncertain. Every single one of those qualities translates directly into strong screen performance.
Acting in the genres Scarlett favors often requires physical precision that untrained actors fumble visibly. A home invasion thriller demands controlled panic — the kind that reads as real on camera without injuring anyone or ruining the shot. A biographical period drama requires posture, carriage, and movement choices that signal character without calling attention to themselves. Scarlett’s body already knows how to occupy space deliberately and purposefully. Cameras pick that up immediately, even when audiences can’t name exactly what they’re responding to.
How Cheerleading Skills Transfer Directly to Film Performance
| Cheer Skill | Direct On-Set Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Flyer body control | Physical precision in demanding scenes |
| Routine memorization under pressure | Script and blocking retention during takes |
| Competing in front of judges | Camera composure during high-pressure shoots |
| Team synchronization | Scene partner chemistry and timing |
| Spatial awareness mid-air | Consistently hitting marks on set |
Beyond the physical dimension, competitive All-Star Cheer builds the kind of mental toughness that no acting class can replicate. You perform under real pressure, in front of real judges, with teammates depending on you not to drop the routine. Scarlett didn’t accidentally collect a useful extracurricular. She spent years building one of the most practical actor’s toolkits imaginable, and she built it without ever realizing that’s exactly what she was doing.
Why Is the Utah Film Scene Secretly a Goldmine?
Hollywood has a gravitational pull that’s genuinely difficult to argue against. But Utah has been quietly constructing something worth paying close attention to, and the people inside it know exactly what they’re building. Scarlett’s entire trajectory emerged from this ecosystem, and understanding why it works helps explain how she developed as quickly as she did.
Angel Studios, based in Provo, has demonstrated repeatedly that faith-adjacent, family-oriented content can reach enormous audiences without Hollywood budgets or traditional studio infrastructure. Projects emerging from this world find devoted audiences who feel underserved by mainstream entertainment, and those audiences show up with remarkable loyalty. Utah filmmakers understand this audience deeply and build content specifically for them.
For young actors like Scarlett, Utah offers something Los Angeles genuinely cannot always provide: the opportunity to build real credits on real stories with real production budgets while still in the formative years of development. You don’t spend three years waiting tables between background work in crowd scenes. You work. You develop a genuine creative relationship with directors like T.C. Christensen, who cast you again because you delivered something memorable the first time around. You build an actual resume instead of a highlight reel full of blink-and-miss-it appearances.
The trade-off is mainstream visibility. Utah projects rarely land on entertainment magazine covers or dominate awards season conversation. But Scarlett isn’t playing for covers right now. She’s playing for range, depth, and a professional track record that tells future directors she can be trusted with heavy, meaningful material. Utah is where she sharpened every tool she has. What comes next is where she gets to use them at full force on a larger stage.
What Should We Expect from ‘Standout: The Ben Kjar Story’?
Standout: The Ben Kjar Story is a biographical documentary-drama hybrid directed by Tanner Christensen — and it carries an IMDb rating of 9.2, which is extraordinary by virtually any standard of measurement. The film runs 1 hour and 39 minutes, carries a PG rating, and features Ben Kjar alongside Anthony Robles, with Scarlett Hazen appearing as a Cheerleader in the cast.
Ben Kjar is a wrestler who overcame craniofacial abnormalities to become a champion athlete. The film tells his story with the kind of raw emotional honesty that resonates deeply with audiences who want real human experiences on screen rather than manufactured drama. Viewer responses have described it as essential viewing for anyone navigating significant personal challenges — not just athletes or people with specific medical conditions, but anyone facing the kind of obstacle that makes you want to turn back and give up entirely.
Scarlett’s role as a cheerleader in this particular film creates a neat, almost poetic convergence of her real-world athletic identity and her professional screen work. She isn’t faking a background she doesn’t have. She brings the actual lived experience of competitive cheer to a role that calls for exactly that authenticity. Audiences respond to genuine physicality and genuine presence even when they can’t articulate precisely what they’re picking up on. It reads as real because it genuinely is.
Message-driven stories built around real human resilience are the backbone of the independent film industry. They sell reliably. They attract passionate, word-of-mouth audiences. And for an actor, they provide the kind of emotionally layered scenes that demonstrate real range on a future demo reel. Scarlett consistently gravitates toward exactly these kinds of projects, and that pattern of choices reveals something important about her instincts as a developing professional. A 9.2 IMDb rating doesn’t happen by accident — it reflects a story that connects with real people on something deeper than entertainment. Being part of that conversation is worth far more than a bigger paycheck on a forgettable project.
How Does She Maintain Such a Private Personal Life?
Here’s something genuinely rare in a media-saturated, chronically overshared cultural moment: Scarlett Hazen keeps her personal life personal. And she does it without making a public statement about keeping her personal life private, which would itself be a form of attention-seeking. She simply doesn’t offer the raw material for tabloid speculation, and in doing so, she controls her own narrative completely.
Most young actors in the social media era feel a relentless pressure to document everything — every breakfast, every audition spiral, every relationship development, every vulnerable 2 AM thought. Their personal brand becomes inseparable from their professional reputation, and when the personal life inevitably gets complicated — which it always does — the professional career absorbs the collateral damage.
Scarlett doesn’t appear to play that game at all. She spends time with family and close friends, engages in grounding personal habits like hiking, reading, and yoga, and approaches her non-working life as something genuinely separate from her public-facing career. Those choices aren’t glamorous. They don’t generate content. They’re just a person taking care of themselves quietly and intentionally. In an industry that chews through young talent faster than most people change jobs, that kind of deliberate self-care isn’t a personality quirk — it’s a survival strategy.
Her exact birthdate hasn’t been confirmed consistently across public sources, and her relationship history doesn’t appear anywhere in entertainment media. That’s entirely by design. She lets the performances carry the conversation. She saves the personal emotional reserves for the work, where they actually serve a purpose, rather than spending them on follower counts and engagement metrics. It’s an almost old-fashioned approach to fame, and it’s almost certainly one of the reasons she still has genuine depth to bring to a camera.
Is Her Acting Style Actually Natural or Just Good Directing?
It’s a fair and genuinely interesting question. Great directors can pull remarkable performances from average actors. T.C. Christensen, who has worked with Scarlett twice now, is a skilled filmmaker with a clear vision and a strong track record. So how much of what audiences respond to in her performances is authentically her, and how much is the craftsmanship of the people operating the camera?
The most convincing answer sits in the range itself. If her performances were primarily a product of strong directorial guidance, she’d be excellent in one specific type of material and noticeably weaker in everything else. Directors have particular styles. They pull specific emotional registers from the actors they work with. But Scarlett has delivered genuinely engaging work in faith-based biographical drama, romantic comedy, survival thriller, and inspirational documentary genres that demand completely different internal approaches from any performer attempting all of them.
She started with formal acting and singing lessons from the very beginning, building a technical foundation alongside whatever natural emotional access she brought to the work. That foundational training matters more than most people realize. Most gifted child actors possess one of two things: raw emotional access or technical discipline. The strongest eventually build both simultaneously. Training doesn’t replace instinct — it organizes instinct. It gives you a reliable method for accessing emotion on demand, even when you aren’t personally feeling it, even on the sixteenth consecutive take at eleven o’clock at night.
Her competitive cheer background then layered in a physical intelligence that coaches typically call body awareness. When your body knows how to move with genuine purpose — which every competitive flyer absolutely does after years of training — you carry yourself differently in front of a camera. You don’t stand awkwardly or fill space without intention. You commit to physical choices with confidence. Combined with the emotional and technical training she’s been accumulating since age four, what you see on screen is the convergence of two completely parallel disciplines. That isn’t an accident of good direction. That is a young actress who has been deliberately building something for a very long time.
What Does Her Future Look Like?
The child-to-adult transition is acting’s most brutal and unforgiving obstacle course. The road from promising child actor to credible adult lead is littered with careers that never made it across. Most people can immediately name a dozen former child stars who never successfully navigated to the other side with their professional reputations intact. The ones who do make it across share certain consistent qualities: they stayed genuinely grounded, they diversified their credits early and deliberately, and they resisted the pull toward chasing celebrity at the expense of craft.
Scarlett checks every single one of those boxes.
She has the work ethic of a trained athlete. She has the resume of someone who has been making calculated professional decisions for years. And perhaps most importantly, she has the fundamental normality of a person who grew up in Utah rather than in the specific pressure cooker that LA creates for young performers. That combination is considerably rarer than it sounds. People who haven’t been hollowed out by the machinery of early fame tend to make the most compelling actors because they still have something genuine left to give when the camera rolls.
A mainstream television drama — the kind produced for a major streaming platform or broadcast network — is a realistic and logical next step. She has the screen presence and the demonstrated dramatic range for that kind of sustained, episodic storytelling. But she could also continue to dominate the independent feature world, building a niche as the kind of reliable, emotionally precise lead who consistently elevates every project she touches. Either path is genuinely viable. Both are professionally respectable.
The most exciting possibility, honestly, is the one where she finds a way to do both simultaneously — anchoring a prestige streaming project that reaches a genuinely massive audience while continuing to develop as a dramatic force in independent cinema. The Utah film scene gave her something that Hollywood often systematically denies young talent: time. Time to develop without crushing external pressure. Time to fail in smaller rooms and learn quietly from it. Time to build real creative trust with filmmakers who care about the work. She used that time exceptionally well. The next chapter is going to be genuinely worth watching.
FAQs
Who is Scarlett Hazen?
Scarlett Hazen is an American actress from Syracuse, Utah, known for her work in Love, Kennedy (2017), Love in Aruba (2021), Babysitter Must Die (2020), and Escape from Germany (2024). She’s recognized for her unusual range across faith-based drama and genre thriller filmmaking.
What was Scarlett Hazen’s breakthrough role?
Her breakthrough came playing Young Kennedy in the 2017 biographical drama Love, Kennedy, directed by T.C. Christensen for Angel Studios. She portrayed the childhood version of Kennedy Hansen, a Utah teenager with terminal Juvenile Batten Disease, at just five years old.
Does Scarlett Hazen have siblings in acting?
Yes. Her younger brother, Manning Hazen, is also an actor, building his career within Utah’s independent film scene. She also has two additional brothers, making four siblings total in the family.
What is Standout: The Ben Kjar Story?
It’s a 2025 biographical documentary-drama directed by Tanner Christensen that tells the story of wrestler Ben Kjar, who overcame craniofacial abnormalities to become a champion. The film currently holds a 9.2 rating on IMDb. Scarlett appears as a Cheerleader.
What genres does Scarlett Hazen work in?
Her range spans faith-based biographical dramas, romantic films, horror-adjacent home invasion thrillers, and inspirational sports documentaries — an unusually wide spectrum for a young actress at this stage of her career.
What is her athletic background?
She competed in All-Star Cheer as a flyer, requiring intense physical discipline, spatial awareness, and body control — all of which directly enhance her physical presence and performance precision on screen.
How does Scarlett Hazen handle her personal life?
She maintains a deliberately private personal life, keeping her relationships and personal habits largely out of public view. She focuses on grounding activities and lets her professional work carry her public identity.
What’s next for Scarlett Hazen?
Her most recent high-profile project is Standout: The Ben Kjar Story (2025). Industry observers expect her to pursue mainstream television or streaming opportunities as a natural next step in her transition from established indie actress to wider-audience lead.
