It’s been nearly 25 years since “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” first hit cinema screens. As fans are gearing up to celebrate the anniversary, however, Jake Lloyd, one of the movie’s lead actors, is noticeably absent from publicity.
Although the once-child actor has always kept a low profile and left his acting career behind not long after the movie’s release, there is also a troubling background story behind his absence. Jake, now 35 years old, has been battling with serious mental health issues for years.
Jake played the role of a young Anakin Skywalker in the movie. Since then, he has mostly stayed out of the spotlight.
His mother, Lisa Lloyd, recently spoke about her son’s plight with mental health in an exclusive interview with Scripps News. In the interview, Ms. Lloyd also spoke about the family tragedies that her son experienced and how he truly feels about “Star Wars.”
While still in high school, Jake started having problems with his mental health. He was initially given a preliminary diagnosis of bipolar disorder and prescribed medication.
“He started talking about ‘realities.’ He didn’t know if he was in this reality, or a different reality. I didn’t really know exactly what to say to that,” his mother said.
The medications Jake was prescribed, however, did not appear to help him. Then, after graduating high school in 2007, he was excited to move on to Columbia College in Chicago after the summer break, but his brief stint at the private arts school was mired with difficulties.
“He missed a lot of classes, and he was telling me that people were following him,” according to Ms. Lloyd.
It was then that things started taking a turn for the worse, and he would suffer from what appeared to be hallucinations, saying that people with “black eyes” were staring at him in the street. He also started having conversations late at night with “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart through his TV. His mother said that although her son didn’t say so himself, but he was hearing voices in his head.
After leaving college after just one-and-a-half semesters, Jake moved with his mother to Indiana in early 2008, where he continued seeing therapists and psychiatrists. It was then that he was officially diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, news that he did not receive very well.
“When they finally told him, it totally threw him off into an even worse depression,” Ms. Lloyd said. “It was really hard.”
According to World Health Organization statistics, roughly 25 million people suffer from the disorder, which can have a devastating impact on a person, including delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and a lack of motivation.
However, Jake’s condition was further exacerbated by a neurological disorder called anosognosia, which made treatment difficult.
The condition caused Jake to be mostly unaware of his symptoms.
“He didn’t think he needed to take medication because he wasn’t sick. He didn’t think he needed to go to the therapist because there’s nothing wrong with him,” his mother said.
Eventually, some of Jake’s medicines stopped working, and at times, he would totally quit taking any medication, Mrs. Lloyd explained, which led him to sometimes self-medicate with illicit drugs.
Then, in 2015, Jake was arrested in South Carolina while on a solo road trip from Florida to Canada. Police told his mother that he led them on a multi-county chase before crashing his car.
The incident caused a rift between mother and son, and he refused any contact with her. Despite his mother’s demands to have prison officials give him his medication and have him admitted to hospital, the officials refused, and he ended up spending nearly a year in jail.
“As a mom, you’re just pulling your hair out because your child needs help. You know that he’s sick. You know that he’s not going to get any better unless he gets some medication,” Ms. Lloyd said.
After much effort, she managed to get through to her son after mailing him, which led him to be able to go to a hospital before moving to California with his mother after his release.
But all was not well even after the move. Jake’s hallucinations got more intense, and when his sister Madison died in 2018 in her sleep of natural causes, he plummeted even further into the abyss.
“He just couldn’t handle it. He didn’t know how to process it,” his mother said. “Sometimes, he would just start saying that he really missed Madison. That’s about as much of a conversation as we’d have about it. “
“At least he was acknowledging it,” she added.
Madison was 2 years his junior and also appeared in “The Phantom Menace” as an extra in the film’s finale,
Then, about a year ago, Jake suffered a complete mental breakdown when he blocked a road by stopping in the middle lane, causing traffic to halt. He was then questioned by police, to which he responded incoherently.
“The police got there, and they asked Jake some questions,” Ms. Lloyd said. “He was talking to them, but none of it made sense. It was all word salad.”
This time, however, Jake was admitted to a hospital and avoided jail time. Soon after, he transferred to an inpatient program at a mental health rehabilitation facility.
During the interview, Ms. Lloyd also addressed rumors that had been spreading about the reasons behind Jake’s decision to quit acting.
“People say he quit because of ‘Star Wars.’ Well, that’s not true. It didn’t have anything to do with ‘Star Wars.’ It had more to do with our family. And we were going through a divorce,” Ms. Lloyd explained. “Things were unsettled and kind of rough. And Jake didn’t seem to be having a lot of fun auditioning anymore.”
She said that negative responses from critics and viewers to “The Phantom Menace” were not the reason for Jake’s decision nor for his mental illness.
“It would have happened anyway. I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic,” she insisted, adding also that she shielded Jake from most of the negative backlash from the movie.
”He didn’t know. He didn’t care,” Ms. Lloyd said. “Everybody makes such a big deal about that. And it’s rather annoying to me because Jake was a little kid when that came out, and he didn’t really feel all that stuff because I didn’t let him online.”
Currently, Jake is just over halfway into an 18-month stay at the rehabilitation facility. His new rehabilitation program is so far showing promise. His mother says they’re now in a better place, and she hopes that this time it will mark a turning point for him.
“He’s doing much better than I expected,” she 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.”
