Jake Lloyd, best known for playing young Anakin Skywalker in 1999's Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, has largely remained out of the spotlight for the past two decades, even as the rest of the cast has celebrated the prequel's 25th anniversary with a number of recent interviews.
His mother, Lisa, has broken the silence, however, giving an interview to Scripps News that was published yesterday. In it, she said Jake has largely not been in the public eye not because of the backlash to The Phantom Menace, but because of his own mental health and family struggles that he's been dealing with for years. In fact, she explained, he's still quite the fan of Star Wars.
“He loves all the new Star Wars stuff,” she said. “People think Jake hates Star Wars. He loves it.”
She added that he's recently been catching up on the Disney+ series Ahsoka, and even got an Ahsoka Tano action figure as a gift for his 35th birthday last week. She explained that she "protected" Jake, who was 10 at the time The Phantom Menace filmed, from the backlash.
"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.”
Lisa acknowledged her son was bullied in high school over The Phantom Menace, something he had talked about in previous interviews. He told The Sun in 2012 that his school life was a "living hell," and that he had destroyed all his Star Wars memorabilia.
But, according to Lisa, the assertions that Jake left Hollywood entirely because of The Phantom Menace and Star Wars are "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,” she said. “Things were unsettled and kind of rough. And Jake didn't seem to be having a lot of fun auditioning anymore.”
Lisa shared Jake's struggle with mental health, which she says started when he was in high school. The Lloyds suffered a family tragedy as well, with Jake's younger sister, Madison, dying of natural causes in 2018 at the age of 26. But while he has struggled with his mental health and other areas of his life, Lisa says that he is starting to do better.
“He is relating to people better and becoming a little bit more social, which is really nice," she said.
When asked if Jake would ever appear in another Star Wars project, she noted that he loved filming The Phantom Menace, and she's "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," she said. "So we'll see.”
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
