Freddie Highmore in August Rush Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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W.C. Fields once advised, "Never work with children or animals," but Fields never had the pleasure of working with Freddie Highmore. The young star of such films as Finding Neverland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with whom more and more actors and directors are lining up to work, just celebrated his fifteenth birthday on the set of his latest film, August Rush. Those who have already worked with Highmore, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory director Tim Burton, have nothing but praise for him. Burton went so far as to call Highmore "the most professional actor I have met." And August Rush costar Jonathan Rhys Meyers notes that, while Highmore is "older than his years, because his experience has dictated that he is older than his years," Highmore is not precocious in his knowledge: "He is still very much a kid. But when you get to a deep conversation he is also a grownup, because he has had to live in this grownup world."

In the film industry, where the words "child actor" together summon images of police run-ins and E! True Hollywood stories, London-born Highmore remains above the fray and quietly out of the glare of the media, booking one high-profile lead after the other while completing his studies in one of England's most prestigious schools.

From a suite in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and under the unobtrusive eye of his father, Highmore discusses his role as the titular August Rush, a child prodigy who grows up in an orphanage with an all-consuming passion for music and a burning determination to find the parents that he still believes continue to look for him.

How did you become involved in August Rush — did you audition for this with director Kirsten Sheridan?
I went to see [producer] Richard Lewis. We were in L.A. at the time. We met up about the project, and he let me know about it. And it went from there, really. Then we met with Kirsten, maybe a year or maybe 6 months before we actually started the film.

So the script couldn't have been completed.
It wasn't completed. It changed I guess quite a bit between the time that I was going to do it and when we actually made it.

What was the most challenging thing about it, aside from trying to learn a musical instrument?
The conducting. It seems like you can wave your hands around and that'd be OK. But I wanted to do it really strictly right so that when people look at it, they'd believe you. We had lessons with conductors and stuff like that to try and get it right. I just wanted to do it properly, I guess. I think you could tell if I were just sort of making it up as I go along, maybe.