Adorable in Jerry Maguire and Stuart Little, here’s why you never saw Jonathan Lipnicki again!

Revelation of the formidable film “Jerry Maguire”, which Tom Cruise electrified by playing a sports agent, Jonathan Lipnicki embodied, at 5 years old, the adorable child of Renée Zellweger. And later experienced a big slump.

Wonderful film by Cameron Crowe, electrified by a brilliant Tom Cruise as a sports agent and Cuba Gooding Jr, who will be crowned with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, Jerry Maguire was also the real revelation of an adorable kid, in the guise of Five-year-old Jonathan Lipnicki, who took his first steps in front of the camera in the film. The National Broadcast Film Critics Association had even awarded him, in 1996, the prize for Best interpretation by a child for his performance of Ray Boyd, the son of Renée Zellweger.

If Jonathan Lipnicki subsequently toured in a few productions, lending his voice to the baby tiger of Dr. Dolittle by Betty Thomas, in the Stuart Little films, or even for three episodes in season 3 of the Dawson series, his career in front of the camera also had a hiatus of many years, starting in the second half of the 2000s.

Jonathan Lipnicki speaks…

In a very recent interview to the website /film, Lipnicki, now 31 years old, rightly and frankly evokes his absence from the screens. If he turned in a few short films and a handful of films left directly to forgotten DVDs, his career never recaptured the light of his very promising beginnings.

“The biggest transition for me was…I hadn’t worked for a very long time. People always put it down to ‘oh I went to high school’, that kind of stuff. That’s what people tell you sometimes when they’re not working. Or if they’ve been a child actor or whatever, that they’ve taken a long time off. I’ve taken time off, in the sense that it wasn’t not the only priority [film] I had. But I didn’t work because I just didn’t work. I didn’t really get any roles for a while.” Jonathan Lipnicki

“I WAS NOT GOOD ENOUGH…”

Lipnicki liked to play on screen, but he also disappeared because he was deemed not good enough to stay in the circuit. “I’m honest about it. It was because I wasn’t a very good actor at one point. The great thing about being a young actor, as a child, is that there’s this wonder childlike, this spontaneity”.

That’s also why you see a lot of quite talented kids. Then the filters appear, and you get nervous. Me, I went from a state of doing things naturally, to trying to do like my favorite actors.

To beef up his play, as a certain Aimé Jacquet would have said, Lipnicki took acting lessons after high school, and really immersed himself in the profession. “I had never done theater when I was a kid, so I started doing it. I always liked it, I found a new form of satisfaction in it. And it’s really, I think , the best job in the world when you have the pleasure of doing it”.

He continues a little further: “I am very grateful for what I did when I was a child, and it certainly helps me in many ways. But it opens doors and it closes others. J “I have great opportunities because of what I’ve done in the past. And also sometimes it can be more difficult ground in some ways. And I think that’s how that influences my career today.”

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