Mia Tomlinson’s Breakout Performance in ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’

The Snapshot: In the fourth and (supposedly) final entry in the Conjuring horror franchise, Ed and Lorraine Warren take on their final case, exploring the supernatural.

(The Conjuring: Last Rites is now showing in theaters)

The Performance: After more than a decade on the big screen, audiences finally meet Ed and Lorraine Warren’s adult daughter early in The Conjuring: Last Rites, and she arrives in the form of English actress Mia Tomlinson. Doe-eyed and fresh faced, Tomlinson’s Judy Warren brings a new facet to a series that has started to feel stale a dozen years in. After all, Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) have faced down a lot of demons, some of them scarier than others.

Like that creepy Annabelle doll. Yikes.

Key Insights:

Mia Tomlinson plays the adult Judy Warren, the daughter of Ed and Lorraine Warren, in the fourth and supposedly final entry of the Conjuring horror franchise, The Conjuring: Last Rites.

The article credits Tomlinson, a 30-year-old actress playing a 21-year-old character, with being the “beating heart” and keeping the film engaging with her unique combination of innocence and world-weariness.

Casting directors Rose Wicksteed and Sophie Kingston-Smith noted that Tomlinson’s deep preparation, including listening to a horror movie soundtrack during a callback, demonstrated the commitment that secured her the role after a lengthy search.

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In this fourth installment, which mostly takes place in 1986, Ed and Lorraine are basically retired when their now 21-year-old daughter Judy brings home her relatively new boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy), with whom she has rather quickly gotten quite serious.

As they settle into easier lives in Connecticut and Judy and Tony get engaged, a family in Western Pennsylvania stumbles across a cursed artifact that Ed and Lorraine came across when she was pregnant with Judy. As the family’s lives spiral out of control, Ed and Lorraine resist the call to help them — Ed’s health is failing and they’re both worn out from a lifetime of battling evil — but eventually Judy gets involved and that brings the whole family into it.

For fans of the series, it’s probably a solid capper to what has been an undeniably successful run, though as a standalone film, it tends to take far too long to get going before the inevitably supernatural battle in the film’s final act.

What keeps it going, really, is Tomlinson, a 30-year-old actress who plays much younger, and whose winsomeness is a welcome change. Tomlinson doesn’t have a ton of on-screen experience, and we’ll talk about all of it below, but that’s not at all clear by her work in this film. Judy is the movie’s beating heart, and Tomlinson brings a unique combination of innocence and world weariness that ties it all together.

Judy has her mother’s gift/curse of being able to see horrible things, a skill her mother has spent years teaching her to stifle, but in the lead up to this particular story, it’s clearly been getting worse. A lot of actors would make a cliché out of those scenes where Judy is struggling with what she’s seeing, and the evil with which she is coming face to face.

Not Tomlinson, who seems to revert to childhood every time this happens, reminding us that the character was a little girl when the ability manifested. In a sense, Judy has never grown up, and this battle she wages alongside her parents against the demons who almost killed her as she was being born is a coming of age story. The actress really sells this, and does so in a way that feels natural, rather than forced.

The thing is, though, as natural a performer as Tomlinson might be, this kind of performance still comes from an enormous amount of preparation. Casting director Rose Wicksteed, who cast the movie alongside Sophie Kingston-Smith, said of Tomlinson, “Judy has to go on such a journey, with such an emotional range that has to be found, and we went on a very lengthy, in-depth casting process [for] that role. Mia obviously had done a few things before, but nothing this size, and when we auditioned her in the room, she blew us away. There’s only a few auditions [where] you’re really like, ‘Oh, something’s happening here.’”

Kingston-Smith added, “She really earned it. She fought for it, she prepared. She was just passionate about it, to the point where, in her call back with [director] Michael [Chaves], we were all looking at each other because there was this really eerie sound in the casting room, and I think we were looking at each other, wondering if everyone else could hear it, or if it was on our heads.

We were doing really intense scenes that involved a lot of emotion and then a lot of stillness. Then I looked at Mia, and I said, ‘Mia, is that noise coming from your headphones?’ And we realized that in order to get into the zone, she had been listening to a horror movie soundtrack to get herself in the right state of mind. I think that just speaks to the type of commitment that she had, as well as being so right for it.”

It doesn’t take much for the audience to agree.

The Career: Like a lot of horror movie ingenues, Mia Tomlinson’s résumé before this breakthrough role is fairly thin. She has only been on screen for the last four years, starting with her role as Anne Bonny on the 2021 six-episode docudrama The Lost Pirate Kingdom. She followed that up with a run on the BritBox five-episode limited series The Beast Must Die, opposite Jared Harris, Cush Jumbo and Billy Howie.

Setting aside a couple of short films, her only other major casting was in the 2023-24 Doctor Who podcast series, The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles, before she was cast as Judy Warren. As noted, Judy is the movie’s heart, and the skill with which Tomlinson acquitted herself means that there will be a lot more major roles coming her way before too long.

Key Takeaways:

Tomlinson’s performance is praised for bringing a new and welcome facet to the long-running series, making the character’s struggle with her supernatural abilities a natural-feeling coming-of-age story.

Prior to her breakthrough as Judy Warren, Tomlinson’s career had primarily consisted of roles in the docudrama The Lost Pirate Kingdom, the limited series The Beast Must Die, and a Doctor Who podcast series.

Industry professionals predict that due to the skill she demonstrated in this major role, Tomlinson is likely to receive a significant increase in major roles in the near future.