Martin Compston, an athletic 17-year-old student from a small town near Glasgow, Scotland, was looking forward to a career in soccer when on a lark he attended an open audition for British director Ken Loach.
Within two days of receiving his final exam results, Compston was offered both a professional soccer contract from a local team and the lead role in Loach's gritty drama "Sweet Sixteen."
The film was scheduled to shoot during a two-month break in his soccer season, so Compston took the role. "If I'd never had that free time, I don't think I would have made the film," he says.
Since then, Compston, now 18, has received a standing ovation at Cannes for "Sweet Sixteen," garnered strong notices for his heartfelt performance and landed a Creative Artists Agency agent. He also quit professional soccer after eight months to pursue acting full time.
Making that decision was gut-wrenching, he says, but "a lot of people in Scotland would kill for the chance I have."
"To turn it up just wouldn't seem right," he added.
Compston is just one of several young discoveries with either no training or limited experience who have made impressive debuts in several recently acclaimed independent films:
* Victor Rasuk, 19, who in "Raising Victor Vargas" plays the cocksure yet vulnerable title character, a Lower East Side teenager who awkwardly romances neighborhood beauty "Juicy" Judy, played by another newcomer, Judy Marte, 20.
* Keisha Castle-Hughes, 14, who plays a preternatural Maori girl who challenges the patriarchal traditions of her tribe in the New Zealand drama "Whale Rider," which opened Friday.
* The ensemble cast of "Camp," writer-director Todd Graff's musical look at a group of theater-loving adolescents struggling with self-esteem, romance and sexuality while staging shows at a performing-arts summer camp. It opens July 25.
All were found in extensive casting searches and none had previous film or television credits. For the few newcomers who catch such a break, it can be a springboard to a Hollywood career; think of the low-budget films that introduced then-unknowns Rosario Dawson and Chloe Sevigny ("Kids"), Jamie Bell ("Billy Elliot"), Kerry Washington ("Our Song") and Anna Paquin ("The Piano," for which she won an Oscar).
Natural actors are rare
