Jonah Byrde

Jonah is the youngest Byrde, a watchful, quietly capable kid dragged from Chicago suburbia into the Ozarks when his parents' money-laundering scheme uproots the family. He's precocious with guns, drones, and numbers, more observant than his siblings, and unnervingly calm in the face of danger most children would run screaming from.

The show trusts Gaertner to play stillness, and he does it better than actors twice his age — Jonah watches adults lie to each other and to him, and you can see him quietly filing it all away. He's the character who forces you to ask what this life is actually doing to a child, without the show ever spelling it out.