Elf child star totally unrecognisable 20 years after starring in festive film
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A former child star who appeared in the Christmas movie Elf now looks totally unrecognisable.
Back in 2003 Daniel Tay, now 31, played the younger brother of Will Ferrell’s Buddy, a human raised by Santa’s elves who learnt about his origins and travelled to New York City to meet his biological father.
The young actor played Daniel Hobbs, whose father Walter (played by the late James Caan) was a cynical children’s book publishing executive and Buddy’s biological dad too.
Now, 20 years on from the release of the festive favourite film, Daniel would be hard to recognise.
Just 11 years old when he took on the role, Elf marked his acting debut, with Daniel then going on to appear in the movie American Splendor as Young Harvey Pekar.
His other acting roles included Artie Lange’s Beer League as Max and Brooklyn Rules as Young Bobby.
He was also the voice of the titular character in Doogal and over the years has also done work for video games, voicing Pedro De La Hoya in Bully and Bill Blue in Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony.
He eventually left acting behind and studied at Yale University, graduating with an economics degree.
Since then, he’s reported to have worked as an instructor for the SAT.
According to the company’s website, while at Yale, Daniel served as a Teaching Assistant and Peer Tutor in the Department of Computer Science and was also a recipient of the Richard U. Light Fellowship for his studies in Mandarin Chinese language.
‘He believes that teaching and learning are expressions of the basic human need for mutual understanding,’ it continued.
‘With this in mind, he works with students to cultivate relationships based in clarity, humour, structure and respect.’
Following his stint as an SAT tutor, the former actor became a research fellow at Columbia University and is now reported to be in his second year of studying medicine at Cornell University.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Daniel continues to tutor through a company called Bespoke Education, and volunteers at the New York-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital in patient services.
When it was released in the United States, Elf proved to be an instant hit, grossing $220m (£164m) worldwide.
However, before he died earlier this year, Caan spoke about one of the reasons a sequel never happened, putting it down to star Will and director Jon Favreau not getting along.
‘We were gonna do [a sequel] and I thought, “Oh my God, I finally got a franchise movie, I could make some money, let my kids do what the hell they want to do”,’ he said.
He went on to share: ‘The director and Will didn’t get along very well…so, Will wanted to do it, he didn’t want the director, and he had it in his contract, it was one of those things.’
Back in 2021 Will also shared how he’d turned down $29million (£21m) to star in the sequel after reading a script he didn’t think was any good.
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