Jonathan Taylor Thomas was at the height of his career when he stepped away from Hollywood, leaving young girls yearning for the teen heartthrob, then known as JTT.
The Home Improvement star – who turned 43 on September 8 – was last spotted in 2023 and fans who spent their younger years crushing on him, were shocked over his appearance.
After appearing as Greg Brady’s son on the short-lived 1990 TV series The Bradys, a spinoff of The Brady Bunch, Jonathan Taylor Thomas earned the role on Home Improvement, which starred comedian Tim Allen.
Only 10 when the show premiered in 1991, Thomas, who played the middle child, spent the next eight years grew up in front of an international audience, reaching a stratospheric level of fame as a teen heartthrob to millions of adoring young girls.
“You are a part of their life, and there is a lot that is owed them,” he told the New York Times of his rabid popularity. “But it’s difficult because you want to make everyone happy, but if you try to do that, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”
In 1994, the Pennsylvania-born Thomas, 12, voiced Simba in the hugely successful Disney animated film The Lion King, a film that made fans laugh, cry and sing.
“Simba’s like me,” says Thomas, who used his regular voice to play the little lion in the smash hit. “I just put my natural energy into it. Real curious, fun-loving, always getting into mischief.”
Switching his time between The Lion King and Randy Taylor on Home Improvement, Thomas shares that it was two years of being shuttled back on forth from one set to the next.
“I had to kind of go, ‘Oops! Time to be Randy’…’Oops! Time to be Simba,’” Thomas told People in 1994. “You have to prepare yourself to become this totally different person. I mean, we’re not lions, right?”
Jonathan Taylor Thomas during 1996 Nickelodeon Big Help at Santa Monica Pier in Santa Monica, California, United States. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc)
“I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve done with full-blown migraine headaches,” he says of his exhaustion. “I’d been going nonstop since I was 8 years old…I wanted to go to school, to travel and have a bit of a break.”
Over the next few years, he had guest appearances on several shows, including, Ally McBeal, Smallville and 8 Simple Rules and loaned his voice to animated characters on The Wild Thornberrys and The Simpsons.
Before stepping away, he challenged himself with some edgier roles as a bisexual hustler in the indie film Speedway Junky (1999) and as a persecuted gay teen in Showtime’s Common Ground (2000).
Those roles, combined with maintaining his privacy, sparked rumors about his sexuality, which he gently denied while speaking with Jay Leno.
