One theory about Star Wars child actor Jake Lloyd, who played young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, is that he hates Star Wars and that backlash to his character led to his mental health struggles. Both things are not true, his mother, Lisa, said in a new interview with Scripps News.
She said, “He loves all the new Star Wars stuff. People think Jake hates Star Wars. He loves it.” Lloyd has been watching the Ahsoka TV series on Disney+ and his mother gave him an action figure of Ahsoka for his birthday recently.
Lisa also stressed that it’s her belief that the backlash to The Phantom Menace did not lead to Jake’s mental illness and his decision to quit acting.
“It would have happened anyway,” Lisa said, adding that his biological father’s side of the family has a history of schizophrenia. “I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic.”
Jake is now 10 months into an 18-month stay at an inpatient facility for mental health rehabilitation. He’s doing better already, his mother 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. “He’s doing much better than I expected.”
Jake went to the facility after suffering from what his mother described as a psychotic break in March 2023 when he was driving home after picking up food. “The police got there, and they asked Jake some questions. He was talking to them, but none of it made sense. It was all word salad,” she said.
Before this, in 2008, a doctor said Jake had paranoid schizophrenia, and this diagnosis prompted Jake’s depression to worsen, his mother said. In 2015, Jake was arrested on a roadtrip from Florida to Canada. His mother hired an attorney to help get him out of jail, but Jake never responded, and he spent 10 months in jail. In 2018, Jake’s younger sister Madison died of natural causes in her sleep. “He just couldn’t handle it. He didn’t know how to process it,” his mother said.
For more, check out the full Scripps News story.
