Highlights
- Jonathan Lipnicki goes full frontal in A24’s Primetime as predator Crazyfrog73, whipped cream can included.
- The ex-child star says playing a pedophile scared him more than the nudity, which he’d already done onstage.
- Lipnicki left Los Angeles for Oklahoma, where he teaches acting and produces, with Williston due in November.
Stuart Little‘s little brother has left the building. And he left his pants behind.
Jonathan Lipnicki, the moppet who once told Tom Cruise that a human head weighs eight pounds, goes full frontal in A24’s Primetime, playing a would-be predator caught in Chris Hansen‘s sting-house kitchen. With a can of whipped cream. You read that correctly.
How did he react when he got the news? “I laughed, but it also gave me a lot of anxiety.”
Fair.
Lipnicki, 35, plays a man known only by his username, Crazyfrog73, who enters the house and immediately drops his pants in front of Skyler Gisondo‘s Dan on Dan’s first night as a decoy. Robert Pattinson plays Hansen. Nobody walks out clean.
The nudity itself wasn’t the problem. “I’ve done full frontal before in a play, Lost Girls,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
The problem was the stacking. He said the pedophile element is terrifying to take on by itself, and then the nudity gets added on top. His summary is brutally precise: “Not only are you a pedophile — you’re a naked, full-frontal pedophile.”
That’s the most honest pull quote of awards season, and it isn’t close.
Director Lance Oppenheim did this on purpose. At Venice, he said he cast Lipnicki and Gisondo because of their history as child actors, to help them shed who they used to be on screen. He screened Jerry Maguire for the crew during pre-production and kept wondering where Jonathan was now.
It turns out he was in Oklahoma.
Here’s the part Hollywood won’t love. Lipnicki left Los Angeles, got rid of everything he owned, and drove around the country in his Jeep Wrangler, calling it his Eat, Pray, Love moment, before landing in Oklahoma, where he now teaches acting and produces.
It started with prayer. A little more than a year ago, he began praying nightly for clarity in his career, and told People, “I’m confident the best is yet to come for me.”
Then he got picky. “Once I started saying no, some beautiful things happened.”
Next up is Williston, with Matt Walsh and Geneva Carr, which he executive produced and which premieres in November.
Is it grimly meta to hire a former child star to play exactly what To Catch a Predator was built to expose? Obviously. The kitchen scene counts on that memory: the audience expects the kid and gets the show’s real product instead.
Lipnicki won’t over-read it. He called the film “a commentary on certain elements of that world.”
Smart. Let the whipped cream do the talking.
Primetime starring Robert Pattinson premiered in competition at Venice on September 5 and opened in U.S. theaters through A24 on September 25. Lipnicki wore a green suit to the Beyond Fest premiere in Westwood on September 23, fully clothed this time.
His motto seems to cover everything now: “Whatever the challenge is, I’m up for it.”
