Jerry Maguire Child Actor Jonathan Lipnicki Says He Stopped Acting for a While Because He Wasn't Good

Jonathan Lipnicki was one of the best-known child actors of the late 1990s and early 2000s thanks to his roles in films like Jerry Maguire and Stuart Little, but he disappeared from the scene in the 2010s and now, he's opening up about why. In an interview with /Film (via Variety), Lipnicki revealed that the reason he stepped away from acting wasn't because of high school, but because he says he "wasn't a very good actor" at the time.

"The biggest transition for me was… I didn't work for a long time," Lipnicki said. "And people always frame that as, 'Oh, I went to high school,' and whatnot. And that's the story that people tell sometimes when they don't work. Or if they're a child actor or whatever, they took time off. I did take time off, in the sense that it wasn't the only priority I had. But I didn't work because I just didn't work. I didn't really get any roles for a while."

He went on to explain that the driving force behind why he didn't get roles, was his acting — something he attributed to a shift from being a child to being older and a bit more nervous and trying to be more like other actors he admired.

"I'm honest about that. And it was because [I] wasn't a very good actor at one point," Lipnicki said. "Because the great thing about being young, a kid, is there's this nice inherent childlike wonder. And that's why a lot of kids you see are quite talented. And filters come in and you become nervous…or the world comes into play. And so for me, I went from just doing the natural thing to trying to be like my favorite actors."

Lipnicki said that he ultimately went on to enroll in acting classes after high school as well as taking theater roles as part of an effort to become a better actor — including working as an understudy in a production of Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore that let him learn from Chris Pine. As for his career now, it was announced in August that Lipnicki had joined the cast of Safier Entertainment's indie horror flick Camp Lake Pleasant. That film will also star Robert Lasardo (The Human Centipede 3, Autopsy), Kelly Reiter (Deadlock, The Amityville Uprising), James Di Giacomo (Stowaway), Michael Pare, Bonnie Aarons, Devanny Pinn and Mike Ferguson.

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