Jonathan Lipnicki

Fame arrived before school was finished with him. Lipnicki was the small boy in glasses in Jerry Maguire in 1996, holding scenes opposite Tom Cruise, and for roughly six years he was one of the most employable children in American film: George Little in Stuart Little and Stuart Little 2, the lead in The Little Vampire, Murph in Like Mike, a voice in Doctor Dolittle.

Then the thing that happens to child actors happened. The parts that suit a small, funny child simply do not exist for a teenager, and the machine that had wanted him constantly stopped calling. What is interesting is that he kept going anyway, without the public collapse that usually gets written about. The adult filmography is a working actor's: low-budget horror in Circus Kane and Camp Pleasant Lake, action in Bad Ass 2: Bad Asses and Boone: The Bounty Hunter, independents like Andover, a comic turn in The Re-Education of Molly Singer, and a stint as a contestant on Worst Cooks in America.

He is still at it, with Sarah's Oil and Cottonmouth in 2025 and Primetime after that. Very few people who are famous that early get a second act of any kind, and a long unglamorous middle stretch is a more honest outcome than the story people usually want from a child star.