A few months ago, my younger daughter, Darby, and I were settling into our seats at the local AMC. As the previews rolled, she gasped. “I know that voice,” she said. “That’s Aidan. Mom, that’s Aidan.”

I looked up just in time to see a familiar shock of brown curls. It was indeed Aidan Delbis, former member of the Falcon Players at Crescenta Valley High School in La Crescenta, a kid I had seen perform alongside my daughter in countless student plays.

Only now he was seated at a kitchen table with Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone as the words “Bugonia” and then “directed by Yorgos Lanthimos” flashed across the screen.

“Did you not know?” I asked my daughter. CV is a fine public school with a good theater program, but it isn’t exactly an incubator for nepo babies and aspiring stars. That one of their own had stepped off last year’s graduation stage and into a major film production should have been very big news long before a trailer hit theaters.

“No,” she said, furiously messaging various friends. “But now they will.”

Now they will indeed. When he joined the cast of “Bugonia,” Delbis didn’t just become a part of Lanthimos’ highly anticipated remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 black comedy “Save the Green Planet!” He also entered the mythology of which Hollywood dreams are made: A 17-year old sends in his first-ever open-call submission and lands a major role in a very big movie.

With a script by Will Tracy and obvious Oscar potential, “Bugonia” had its world premiere in August at this year’s Venice Film Festival before launching onto the festival circuit, including screenings in Toronto and New York, in preparation for its release this Friday. A slightly absurdist, darkly funny thriller with political undertones, it revolves around the kidnapping of a pharmaceutical company’s CEO, Michelle (Stone), by wild-eyed conspiracy theorist Teddy (Plemons) and his loyal cousin Don (Delbis).

Teddy believes Michelle is an alien sent to destroy Earth. Don believes in Teddy. Though he falls in with Teddy’s plans, he often questions them, serving as a continual reminder that even within Teddy’s paranoid view of the universe, there is such a thing as going too far. Don is, in many ways, the heart of the film.

He is also, like the actor who plays him, autistic.

Delbis — who chooses to self-describe as autistic rather than neurodivergent — is not someone who has long nursed dreams of stardom. He took drama classes all through high school, but it wasn’t until his junior year, Delbis says, “that I started to get more into the process. I found the general process of acting, of understanding and investing in different personalities, to be fun and sometimes scary.”

Still, he says, “I wasn’t really sure that I wanted it to be my main career. But it so happened that this happened while I was in high school, and here we are.”

Here is the Four Seasons on a very rainy October afternoon where Delbis, now 19, has just finished his first solo photo shoot and is sitting, fortified by Goldfish crackers (his go-to-snack), for his first long one-on-one interview. He went to some of the film festivals and just returned from “Bugonia’s” London premiere, where he signed autographs on the red carpet and enjoyed flying first class. His parents, Katy and David Delbis, are seated nearby, as is his access and creative coach, Elaine Hall.

Delbis is a tall, good-natured young man who speaks with a distinctive cadence and in an unwaveringly calm tone. Aside from a habit of repeating himself as he searches for what he wants to say next, he seems more comfortable discussing his experience with filmmaking than many of the dozens of more experienced actors I have interviewed in this very hotel over the years.

“It all started,” he says, “when my mom was friends with this agent, April, and one day she sent Mom an audition that seemed pretty promising, so I submitted for that. And they really liked it and called me back.”

It actually started a bit further back than that. With Plemons and Stone already cast, Lanthimos had decided that he wanted a nonprofessional actor to play Don.

“We went really wide in trying to find someone really special,” the Greek-born director of “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” says in a phone interview. “With these two experienced actors, I wanted to bring in a different dynamic. As we looked at people, I felt that the character would be more interesting if he was neurodivergent.”

Casting director Jennifer Venditti put out an open call, which April Smallwood of Spotlight Development saw and sent to Delbis’ mother, Katy.

“A happy-go-lucky young man, neurodivergent — it practically described Aidan,” Katy says in a later interview. La Crescenta may not be an industry hub, but, like many in L.A., the Delbis family has a Hollywood connection. Aidan’s older brother, Tristan (who is also neurodivergent), works at a movie theater; father David is about to retire after years at the Writers Guild Health Fund; and Katy, a self-described “creative,” has done some acting herself. But no one saw film-acting as a potential career for Aidan, who was set to take a gap year after high school. And, Katy says, she had no idea what sort of movie it was for. “It said for a ‘big film,’ but they always say that.”

She thought of it a bit like the time Delbis, a member of the high school track team, decided he also wanted to try out for basketball. “As I drove him to the school,” Katy said, “I told him that he might not get on since there were a lot of kids who had been playing basketball for years, which he had not. He said, ‘Mom, I just want to see what it’s like.’”

Now Delbis wanted to see what it would be like to audition for a “big film.”

He had recently performed the Vincent Price monologue from “Thriller” for the school talent show, which Katy filmed on her phone, so Smallwood submitted that. Venditti called Smallwood the next day and met with Delbis over Zoom. Thus began a monthslong process of meetings, rehearsals and auditions.

“We focused on him right away,” Venditti says. “He seemed to have it all. And he was very committed.”

“I was really unaware of how big a project it was,” Delbis said. “I had never seen a film by Yorgos.”

In March, Lanthimos, Stone and Plemons were in L.A. for the Oscars, so they all met with Delbis and came away impressed.

Lanthimos thought of casting a neurodivergent actor in a part because it would bring a natural clarity and unfiltered unpredictability to the role. He didn’t consider it any more challenging than working with any other actor. And when he met Delbis, Lanthimos says, “I just thought: That’s him.”

“Just from watching that first tape, you could see there was something so magnetic about him,” said Stone during a recent phone interview. (She is also a producer on the film.) “Don is the audience’s window, the one who can see through the charade.”

Still, there were many more steps to take.

“It’s a big leap for any nonprofessional,” Stone says. “It’s a big part in what is essentially a three-hander.”

For an autistic actor, it’s an even bigger leap. As talented as Delbis might be, he also had to be able to handle the pressures, boredom and chaos of a film set. Venditti reached out to Hall. The founder of the Miracle Project and mother to a now-adult neurodivergent son, Hall is an acting coach who has worked for more than 20 years to increase the presence and understanding of neurodivergent and disabled people. She is often asked to gauge the ability of actors to take on a certain role — their ease with the material, their physical stamina, their level of independence and their emotional accessibility.

Delbis, she says, ticked all the boxes. He loves horror films, he was on the track team and he was, at the time, about to travel without his parents on a school trip to Sweden.

He is, as he says himself, “a low-key guy,” so Hall gave him some exercises to help him portray more extreme emotions and prepare him for when other cast members might do the same. (One subsequent rehearsal involved a scene in which one of the actors screamed repeatedly.)

Often, Hall says, perfecting these exercises can take weeks; Delbis, working with his mother, did it in a weekend. She also helped him prepare for his meeting with and then chemistry read with Plemons.

Delbis says he was “a bit nervous, though I don’t know why.” He did not recognize Plemons’ name or his face. “I had watched ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I didn’t realize Jesse played Todd. Halfway through [the read], I told him he looked like Todd and he said, ‘That’s because I played him.’ I’ve seen him in other things since then,” Delbis adds. “He’s a very solid actor.”

More important, he says, “Jesse seemed to me to be a very cool guy.”

That feeling is mutual. “When we brought Aidan in, I was excited and a little nervous,” Plemons says during a phone call from London. They started with one of the more extreme scenes from the film. “I was finding my feet too. When it became apparent that he was going to be fine with the darker scenes, I said, ‘This is him; this is Don.’”

While all this was happening, Delbis was finishing his senior year, which included a starring role in a production of “Almost Maine.” “It was not overly hard,” he says, but sometimes it was a lot. “I did one read and then I had to go to rehearsal for the play.”

Venditti remembers that day very well. “Here we were being so careful, treating him like he was fragile and not wanting to overload him,” she says laughing, “and he’s just calmly multitasking.”

When Delbis got the role in May, he and his family signed a nondisclosure agreement, which is why none of his friends knew his news after graduation, and Delbis and his family flew to the U.K. to begin filming. It was a tough secret for his parents to keep. But “any time it looked like I might slip,” Katy says, “Aidan shut me down.” He celebrated his 18th birthday near the set outside of Windsor, where production ran for three months before moving for two weeks in Atlanta.

Hall was hired to be Delbis’ on-set access and creative coach, a job she believes she has invented, meant to make the experience for neurodivergent and disabled actors easier. She suggested that Lanthimos and Tracy simplify Delbis’ script pages, stripping down the description of action “so he wouldn’t get stuck thinking he had to do exactly what was on the page,” she says, which they were happy to do.

“We didn’t want to put any limits on him,” Lanthimos says.

Delbis chose most of his costumes (except a beekeeping suit, motivated by the plot, which he says “was very hot”), which mirrored his own wardrobe preferences down to the horror film t-shirts and mismatched socks. Even the food Teddy and Don eat during the film reflects Delbis’ taste: mac ’n’ cheese, taquitos, spaghetti.

Hall ensured Delbis had extra time before filming, during which she could help him prepare with rehearsal and centering exercises. She visited the set before he arrived so she could tell him exactly what to expect and worked with the production team to ensure that he had his own space between takes. “They built us a little house, with horror posters on the wall and stuffed animals that looked like his cats,” she says. As there were no Goldfish available in the U.K., the production had them flown in.

“Having Elaine there was amazing,” Venditti says. “The idea of having someone to act as eyes and ears of what people are actually experiencing on set, I think it’s groundbreaking. I don’t know why we haven’t done it before.”

Delbis spent a fair amount of time with Plemons, who Hall said occasionally stepped in to help if she had to be away from set.

“We did a decent amount of goofing around,” Delbis says. “The bond that developed between us occurred quite naturally. I consider Jesse a friend.”

For his part, Plemons enjoyed being around someone who spoke his mind.

“I so appreciated Aidan’s inability to tell a lie,” Plemons says. “On a set, you spend so much time waiting around, and he would say, ‘What are we doing? What is taking so long?’ Which was exactly what I was thinking. He’s a very smart, sensitive, self-assured guy, and if you’re unclear in what you’re saying, he will let you know.”

Stone says that while she and Delbis had a friendly rapport, she hung back a little when they weren’t shooting. “I didn’t want to form the same kind of bond Aidan had with Jesse because [in the film] it’s them against me and I didn’t want to do too much to mess with that.”

But, the two-time Oscar winner says, “Aidan is just so funny. He was on a jag during the kidnapping scene. We spent a lot of time together in a basement and Aidan had so many jokes about that.”

“I went through all of ‘Bugonia’ thinking I had never seen Emma in anything,” Delbis says. “Then I realized my parents had shown me a clip of a woman getting very involved in a birthday card — ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ — and that was from‘Easy A.’”

When he was filming, Delbis was all business. Several of the takes which he ad-libbed made it into the film and Delbis is proud of that.

“Despite being in more extreme situations than I’ve been in, there’s something of Don’s emotion and struggles that did feel very familiar to me,” he says. “Feelings of great distress and helplessness and conflictedness and confusion. I have felt that in classes in high school.”

“Aidan has great instincts,” Lanthimos says. “In a scene toward the end [of the film], he was so moving, it was the first time I have ever teared up on set.

There were difficult days — one moment with Plemons, Delbis says, took many takes. “It was hot AF and involved me getting more worked up that I am used to getting,” he remembers. But he appreciated Lanthimos’ willingness to let him try things. “In one scene, Jesse throws a chair and I thought that seemed pretty cool. So at the end of the day, they let me throw a chair. I hope that makes it into the outtakes reel.”

He was also very pleased when the crew threw him a s’mores party at the end of filming. “There was a fire pit on set that looked perfect for s’mores,” he says. “And I told them that, so it was my idea to have a s’mores party.”

Delbis is happy with how the film turned out, including his performance. “I think I looked pretty baller in that suit,” he says of one scene. Though he doesn’t have an opinion on the authenticity debate — whether autistic actors should always be the ones to play autistic characters — he thinks it’s “cool that writers and directors are starting to be more conscientious and give more realistic and respectful depictions of neurodivergent people and characters.”

He is more concerned that audiences understand what he thinks is the most important message of the movie.

“We should try to be more empathetic to people with different worldviews because you never really know what those people are going through,” he says. “The movie feels very relevant to that theme. God knows, people aren’t always willing to be tolerant.”

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