Jonathan Lipnicki reached stardom at the very beginning of his acting career. At age6 he was cast in the cult hit – Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire.
Now, the 26 year old actor has revealed success has come at a very steep price. According to what he recently revealed the lowest point of his life came after the success of Jerry Maguire.
The actor was subsequently bullied wich resulted in anxiety and depression bouts as confirmed in an interview he gave to TooFab this past Tuesday.
“I’ve been in treatment for a very long time because I had a very serious problem with anxiety and depression,” Lipnicki told TooFab. “I felt like I didn’t know how my life was going to end up. It was the lowest point of my life.”
“As a kid-teen I was made fun of relentlessly by some people who are now even my friends on FB. I was told I was a has-been and would never book a job again,” Lipnicki wrote in the post.
The actor found comfort in Brazilian jiu-jitsu training in which he acquired the ranking of brown belt. He is a brown belt under Alan Zborovsky.
In addition to training he also had to learn to deal with day to day anxiousness:
“I didn’t go a day without going home and being upset,” Lipnicki told TooFab. “I didn’t go a day without being called some form of gay slur, or a hateful slur pretty much every day of middle school.”
“I had my own group of friends and people knew me, but it was a wide spectrum. It was kids who thought it was cool, but then you had kids who were really mean,” Lipnicki said. “It was something I definitely had to overcome. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me a little bit to this day to a point where I do have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder where I want to prove the world wrong.”
“All I’ve ever wanted to do my entire life is make movies. To be made fun of for the thing that you love and be told you’re not going to be a success is hard. There were even teachers that called me lazy, but I later found out I had a learning disability called dysgraphia.”
In addition to bjj he also credits basketball for his recovery:
“You have to turn it into something. Whether it’s arts, sports or helping others. I think a lot of kids out there don’t have a direction to go with that pain and they go inside of themselves and they suffer. It’s horrible.”
