When child star Jake Lloyd left acting behind to begin a despair-laden spiral, the blame went everywhere.
The website Fandomwire, for example, blazed away about “Merciless Bullying by Star Wars Fans Who Destroyed His Life.”
That site was not alone. As Spencer Baculi over at BoundingIntoComics noted, “Read nearly any article, blog, or forum post discussing Lloyd’s short acting career from the last ten years and odds are that either the piece itself or one of its reader comments will inevitably raise the claim that the actor chose to leave Hollywood due to the fan backlash he faced thanks to his portrayal of a Young Anakin Skywalker.”
“This narrative gained even further traction when in 2012 Lloyd revealed that his starring as the young Jedi-turned-Sith-turned-Jedi-again had led to him being bullied by his elementary school classmates,” Baculi wrote.
(Of note, Lloyd was a key actor and character in 1999’s “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.”)
But now his mom, Lisa, is revealing that reality was a sadder tale that had nothing to do with “The Phantom Menace.” Instead, it was one growing within Jake that finally emerged into schizophrenia.
“He loves all the new ‘Star Wars’ stuff. People think Jake hates ‘Star Wars.’ He loves it,” she said, noting Jake, now 35, has been watching the “Ahsoka” Disney Plus series, according to Scripps News.
“People say he quit because of ‘Star Wars.’ Well, that’s not true. It didn’t have anything to do with ‘Star Wars.’ It had more to do with our family. And we were going through a divorce,” Lisa said. “Things were unsettled and kind of rough. And Jake didn’t seem to be having a lot of fun auditioning anymore.”
She said whatever was said about him when the film came out never reached him at the time.
“I protected him from the backlash. He was just riding his bike outside, playing with his friends. He didn’t know. He didn’t care,” Lisa said. “Everybody makes such a big deal about that. And it’s rather annoying to me because Jake was a little kid when that came out, and he didn’t really feel all that stuff because I didn’t let him online.”
But by high school, shadows were growing, and Jake had changed.
“He started talking about ‘realities.’ He didn’t know if he was in this reality, or a different reality. I didn’t really know exactly what to say to that,” she said, noting that a diagnosis of bipolar disorder followed.
So did failure and heartbreak.
By 2007, college was falling from his grip while he insisted he was being followed.
“He didn’t tell us he was hearing voices at the time. But he was,” Lisa said.
In 2008, with the college dream faded, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
“When they finally told him, it totally threw him off into an even worse depression. It was really hard. He didn’t think he needed to take medication because he wasn’t sick. He didn’t think he needed to go to the therapist because there’s nothing wrong with him,” she said.
Self-medicating was only part of the spiral that followed. Jake spent 10 months in jail after a high-speed chase in South Carolina.
“As a mom, you’re just pulling your hair out because your child needs help. You know that he’s sick. You know that he’s not going to get any better unless he gets some medication,” Lisa said.
The bottom was reached in March 2023 as they were driving home from a McDonald’s
“He said he wanted to turn the car off. And he turned the car off in the middle of the three lanes, and we were in the middle lane. There was a lot of yelling and screaming,” she said.
“The police got there, and they asked Jake some questions,” Lisa said. “He was talking to them, but none of it made sense. It was all word salad.”
He’s now 10 months into an 18-month stint at a mental health rehab facility.
“He’s doing much better than I expected,” Lisa said. “He is relating to people better and becoming a little bit more social, which is really nice. It’s kind of like having more of the old Jake back, because he has always been incredibly social until he became schizophrenic.”
She said his illness was not related to acting.
“It would have happened anyway. I believe that it was genetic,” she said, referring to Jake’s father’s family. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic.”
But getting better has its limits.
“Jake loved filming ‘Star Wars.’ He had so much fun,” she said.. “I would love for him to get well enough to be able to do a little bit of something, and I’m sure he would maybe like to do that. He couldn’t at this point, but you never know how much he’s going to improve. So we’ll see.”
