Actor relates to roles, but not to girls
The 13-year-old star of ‘Man of the House’ has a hard time accepting his status as a teen heartthrob.
By Janet Weeks
Los Angeles Daily News
Jonathan Taylor Thomas is a smooth talker. The 13-year-old star of “Home Improvement” and the movie “Man of the House” loves to chat. And he’s very good at it. He has a big vocabulary, an easy way and an arsenal of well-thought-out answers.
Touchy subject? But there is one subject over which he tends to lose his cool: girls.
Thomas is a teen-scene heartthrob. The mere mention of his name elicits squeals from the 13-and-under set. Every week, he is deluged with fan mail — a lot of it from girls with crushes on their blond, blue-eyed idol. Mention that, however, and Thomas gets a bit tongue-tied. “I never really expected that,” he said when asked about his pinup-boy status. “It’s not anything I ever planned for. I guess people are fascinated by people on TV.”
In fact, Thomas would much rather talk about fly fishing or acting or his plans than about being the object of affection. Girls, he says, just aren’t on his agenda. “I go to the movies with a group, but no one-on-one dating yet. That’s not something I really want to do now.”
Starting out: What he really wants to do is act — something he’s been doing since age 8 when he landed the part of Greg Brady’s son on “The Bradys,” a short-lived series based on the adult lives of grown-up “Brady Bunch” characters. It died after seven episodes. A month after the show’s last broadcast in 1990, Thomas was cast as Tim Allen’s middle son, Randy, on “Home Improvement.” The show landed at No. 9 on the top 10 list of shows after only its first week.
“I have a goof time,” said, Thomas, one foggy morning before the start of his 9 a.m. work day on the “Home Improvement” set. Typical boys his age, Thomas wore jeans, a striped T-shirt, and oversize green sweat shirt and chunky black shoes. “It’s a lot of work and a lot of long hours,” he said. But it is rewarding, he added. “Seeing people watch and respond — that’s why we make the show. For people to enjoy it, to sit down on Tuesday at 9 o’clock and laugh for 22 minutes.”
In the movies: “Man of the House” is Thomas’ first in-front-of-the-camera movie role (The gravelly-voiced teen provided the voice of Young Simba in “The Lion King.”) In the new film, he plays Ben Archer, the only child of a single parent (Farrah Fawcett). When his mother gets engaged to a federal prosecutor (Chevy Chase), jealous Ben tries to scare off the fiancé by forcing him to join the Indian Guides.
Thomas, who lives in the San Fernando Valley with his single-parent mother and 17-year-old brother, says he enjoyed playing Ben because he could relate to the character’s dilemma. “I come from a single-parent home and the character, Ben Archer, comes from a single-parent home,” he said. “We’re both very precocious and active and curious. He’s very intelligent. He’s rough on the outside but vulnerable inside.”
The real world: In real life, Thomas and his mother, Claudine, are quite close, he said. A former social worker, his mother stays with him on the “Home Improvement” set and waits nearby during press interviews. But because Thomas has an older brother, he has never felt obliged to be “the man of the house,” he said. Still, he understood the character’s motivations for trying to frighten away his mother’s suitor. “It’s not him being a bad kid. He’s protecting the most important thing in his life. Everything he does is out of fear and vulnerability.”
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