Will Poulter will be honored at the Heartland Film Festival, according to Variety. For viewers, that recognition offers an opportunity to look beyond a familiar face and consider the choices that make a performance stick. One revealing place to start is We’re the Millers, where Poulter turns a character frequently treated as a walking embarrassment into the person whose happiness matters most.
This is a retrospective choice, not a claim about the festival’s reasons for honoring him. Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, the 2013 comedy gives Poulter an especially clear acting challenge: make innocence funny without making it entirely disposable. His Kenny Rossmore supplies some of the movie’s broadest laughs, but he also exposes the selfishness that its other characters would prefer to disguise.
Spoiler warning: The following review discusses the plot and ending of We’re the Millers, including its adult humor.
The fake family means something different to Kenny
The premise is a con built around appearances. Drug dealer David Clark, played by Jason Sudeikis, recruits Rose, Casey, and Kenny to pose as his family while transporting marijuana from Mexico into the United States. Respectable vacationers, he reasons, will attract less suspicion. Jennifer Aniston’s Rose and Emma Roberts’ Casey understand that their new identities are part of a transaction.
Kenny approaches the arrangement from a different emotional position. He is not simply pretending to be someone’s son. He is being offered access to an experience he wants. That difference gives the comedy its most productive tension: David sees a useful disguise, while Kenny sees the possibility of belonging.
Listen to his early description of the journey as “a little father and son bonding trip to Mexico.” The joke depends on how wildly his enthusiasm misreads David’s intentions. Yet Poulter does not need to signal that Kenny is secretly miserable. His readiness to invest in the relationship already tells us enough.
The same vulnerability appears when David asks about Kenny’s absent mother. Kenny’s answer, “Last week,” lands with uncomfortable simplicity. What begins as a casual conversation suddenly suggests neglect. Poulter keeps the delivery matter-of-fact, allowing the audience to recognize the problem before Kenny gives it any dramatic emphasis.
Poulter makes sincerity an ensemble skill
Sudeikis gives David the brisk confidence of someone who believes he can talk his way past any objection. Aniston’s Rose pushes back with suspicion and irritation. Roberts’ Casey brings a defensive coolness. Against those competing forms of self-protection, Poulter makes Kenny unusually open.
That openness changes the rhythm of their scenes. Where another character might meet an insult with a sharper insult, Kenny often receives it as information. He keeps trying to understand the group and earn a place in it. The laughter comes from the gap between his interpretation and everyone else’s, rather than from a stream of interchangeable jokes.
This is why a supporting performance can shape an entire movie. Kenny gives David’s abrasiveness something to strike against. He also gives Rose and Casey opportunities to become protective without abruptly abandoning their personalities. Our discussion of how supporting characters strengthen a comedy ensemble considers the same principle: a cast becomes interesting when its members want different things from the same situation.
In my reading, Poulter’s strongest contribution is his refusal to play Kenny as someone watching himself be funny. The character wants the experience to work. That investment keeps the audience involved even when the screenplay reaches for an easy humiliation.
The famous payment joke exposes the whole arrangement
“You guys are getting paid?” is funny because Kenny discovers the basic terms of the trip later than everyone else. The other characters are arguing about unequal compensation; he has not even understood that compensation was available.
But the line does more than finish an escalating argument. It reveals that the four travelers have been participating in different stories. David is managing a criminal delivery. Rose and Casey expect payment. Kenny has been pursuing companionship. The joke forces those incompatible assumptions into the open.
Poulter’s bewilderment makes David’s behavior look worse without requiring an accusing speech. Kenny does not need to explain that he has been exploited. His surprise establishes the imbalance more efficiently than an explicit moral judgment could.
The scene also provides a useful way to evaluate the performance beyond its isolated punch line. Watch how much emotional groundwork makes that reaction plausible. Kenny’s willingness to join, his eagerness to please, and his attachment to the family fiction all converge in one question. The moment is compact because the character work has already happened.
Where the comedy undermines its own warmth
We’re the Millers is less convincing when it assumes that escalating Kenny’s embarrassment automatically produces a better scene. Its sexual humiliation and bodily injury jokes sometimes reduce him to a convenient target. The notorious spider-bite sequence, in particular, pushes spectacle ahead of character.
That creates an uneven relationship with the audience. The movie asks us to care about Kenny, then repeatedly invites us to enjoy his discomfort. Cruelty can serve comedy, but repetition makes the mechanism visible. At those points, Poulter is doing more work to preserve sympathy than the writing is doing to deserve it.
The criminal complications also become less engaging than the relationships inside the camper. Once the four central characters develop conflicting loyalties, another threat matters chiefly for what it makes them choose. The movie is most enjoyable when danger puts their emerging affection under pressure; it is more routine when danger merely prolongs the trip.
The ending turns a disguise into a commitment
By bringing the group together in witness protection, the ending gives the invented household a continuing existence. As a plot solution, it is conveniently tidy. As the completion of Kenny’s emotional journey, it makes sense: the role he embraced before the others becomes something they can share.
The deeper question is whether performing care can teach people to practice it. David initially treats family as a visual credential. Kenny treats it as a relationship. The film’s sentimental movement depends on the others gradually recognizing obligations that were absent from their original agreement.
That distinction also runs through our analysis of family roles and emotional need in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The tones could scarcely be further apart, but both invite viewers to separate the names people give their relationships from the care those relationships actually provide.
My verdict on We’re the Millers is qualified affection: its ensemble is more persuasive than its plotting, and its warmth survives some blunt attempts to manufacture laughs. Poulter is central to that survival. He makes Kenny’s wish for connection specific enough that the ending feels like an answer to someone’s need.
Heartland’s recognition offers a timely reason to revisit that skill. Beneath the reaction shot and the quotable question is an actor maintaining a character’s emotional logic through a very noisy comedy. Kenny gets laughs because he misunderstands the arrangement. He earns our affection because he understands what he wants from it.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: September 17, 2026 at 15:29:00 PDT (Los Angeles time)
