A boy is a young male human, usually child or adolescent. When he becomes an adult he's described as a man. The most apparent thing that differentiates a boy from a girl is that a boy typically has a penis while girls do not. However some intersex children with ambiguous genitals, and biologically female transgender children, may also be classified or self-identify as a "boy".

The term "boy" is primarily used to indicate biological sex distinctions, cultural gender role distinctions or both. The latter most commonly applies to adult men, either considered in some way immature or inferior, in a position associated with aspects of boyhood, or even without such boyish connotation as age-indiscriminate synonym. The term can be joined with a variety of other words to form these gender-related labels as compound words.

The word "boy" comes from Middle English boi, boye ("boy, servant"), related to other Germanic words for boy, namely East Frisian boi ("boy, young man") and West Frisian boai ("boy"). Though the exact etymology is obscure, the English and Frisian forms probably derive from an earlier Anglo-Frisian *bō-ja ("little brother"), a diminutive of the Germanic root *bō- ("brother, male relation"), from Proto-Indo-European *bhā-, *bhāt- ("father, brother"). The root is also found in Flemish boe ("brother"), Norwegian dialectal boa ("brother"), and, through a reduplicated variant *bō-bō-, in Old Norse bófi, Dutch boef "(criminal) knave, rogue", German Bube ("knave, rogue, boy"). Furthermore, the word may be related to Bōia, an Anglo-Saxon personal name.

Richard Stuart Linklater (born July 30, 1960) is an American film director and screenwriter.

Linklater was born in Houston, Texas. He studied at Sam Houston State University and left midway through his stint in college to work on an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. While working on the rig he read a lot of literature, but on land he developed a love of film through repeated visits to a repertory theater in Houston. It was at this point that Linklater realized he wanted to be a filmmaker. After his job on the oil rig, Linklater used the money he had saved to buy a Super-8 camera, a projector, and some editing equipment, and moved to Austin. It was there that the aspiring cineaste founded the Austin Film Society and grew to appreciate such auteurs as Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Josef Von Sternberg, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. He enrolled in Austin Community College in the fall of 1984 to study film.

Since his early 20s, Linklater has been a vegetarian.

Linklater founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 together with his frequent collaborator Lee Daniel, and is lauded for launching and solidifying the city of Austin as a hub for independent filmmaking.

Ethan Green Hawke (born November 6, 1970) is an American actor, writer and director. He made his feature film debut in 1985 with the science fiction movie Explorers, before making a supporting appearance in the 1989 drama Dead Poets Society which is considered his breakthrough role. He then appeared in such films as White Fang (1991), A Midnight Clear (1992), and Alive (1993) before taking a role in the 1994 Generation X drama Reality Bites, for which he gained critical acclaim. In 1995, he starred in the romantic drama Before Sunrise, and later in the 2004 sequel Before Sunset.

In 2001, Hawke was cast as a rookie police officer in Training Day, for which he received a Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category. Other films have included the science fiction feature Gattaca (1997), the title role in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), the action thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), and the crime drama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007).

Patricia T. Arquette (born April 8, 1968) is an American actress and director. She played the lead character in the supernatural drama series Medium for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.

Arquette was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Lewis Arquette, an actor, and Brenda "Mardi" Olivia (née Nowak), an actress, poet, theater operator, activist, acting teacher and therapist. Arquette's mother was Jewish, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor from Poland, and Arquette's father was a convert to Islam and related to explorer Meriwether Lewis. Her paternal grandfather was comedian Cliff Arquette, and her siblings are actors Rosanna, Alexis, Richmond and David Arquette.

Arquette was raised in Virginia and California.

In 1987, Arquette's first starring roles were as pregnant teenager Stacy in television film Daddy, boarding school student Zero in Pretty Smart, and the attention-getting Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. In 1991, she won a CableACE Award for her portrayal of a deaf epileptic in Wildflower. In 1993, she starred in Tony Scott's True Romance. She has since appeared in such critically acclaimed movies as Ed Wood as the "worst ever" film director's eventual wife, Beyond Rangoon, Ethan Frome, Lost Highway, Little Nicky, Stigmata, Bringing Out the Dead, Human Nature, Disney's Holes, and Flirting with Disaster.

Mark Kermode (born 2 July 1963) is an English film critic, musician and a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He contributes to Sight and Sound magazine, The Observer newspaper and BBC Radio 5 Live, where he presents Kermode and Mayo's Film Reviews with Simon Mayo on Friday afternoons. He also co-presents the BBC Two arts programme The Culture Show and discusses other branches of the arts for the BBC Two programme Newsnight Review. Kermode writes and presents a film-related video blog for the BBC.

Kermode, born Mark Fairey in Barnet, North London, England, attended Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, an independent boys' school in Elstree, a few years ahead of comedians Sacha Baron Cohen, Matt Lucas and David Baddiel and in the same year as actor Jason Isaacs. He was raised as a Methodist, and is now a member of the Church of England.

Mark Fairey's parents divorced when he was in his early 20s and he subsequently changed his surname to his GP mother's maiden name by deed poll. (Neither of them is related to the literary critic Frank Kermode.)