Lisa Lloyd, the mother of Star Wars: Episode I star Jake Lloyd, has shared with Scripps News Service an account of her son’s decades-long battle with mental illness.
The former actor, 35, portrayed a 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, which will turn 25 this May. However, after the film faded from theaters, the former child star of Jingle All the Way faded from the spotlight.
His mother wanted to dispel the rumor that it stemmed from some fans snarking on him and the film. “It didn’t have anything to do with Star Wars,” she insists. Her getting divorced was “unsettling and rough” and “Jake didn’t seem to be having a lot of fun auditioning anymore.”
Lisa says as he got into his teens, and later his college years, Jake’s mental health started deteriorating. He began to experience hallucinations and was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
However, Lisa says he refused to take his medication, and after the untimely 2018 death at 26 of his younger sister, that got worse.
He had a series of “psychotic breaks,” one in 2015 that saw him getting into a car chase with police and eventually behind bars for 10 months.
A “full blown” break while she drove with him on the highway in March 2023 led to an 18-month stay in an in-patient psychiatric facility. Ten of those months have passed.
“He’s doing much better than I expected,” Lisa now says. “He is relating to people better … It’s kind of like having more of the old Jake back, because he has always been incredibly social until he became schizophrenic.”
Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.