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.
Terrific 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 Jonathan Lipnicki , who was taking his first steps in front of the camera in the film, aged five. 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 turned thereafter in a few productions, lending his voice to the baby tiger of Dr. Dolittle of Betty Thomas, in the films Stuart Little , or the time of three episodes in season 3 of the series Dawson , his career in front of the camera also had a hiatus of many years, starting in the second half of the 2000s.
In a very recent interview granted to the site / 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 garnish the shelves of 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.”
“I WASN’T 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 acting, as a certain Aimé Jacquet would have said , Lipnicki took acting lessons after high school, and really immersed himself in the craft. “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.”