Jake Lloyd, who played young Anakin Skywalker in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, has been in a mental health facility for 10 months, according to his mother, Lisa Lloyd. Opening up about her 35-year-old son’s ongoing struggles with mental illness in an interview with Scripps News published Monday, Lisa revealed that her son began an inpatient program after suffering what she called “a full-blown psychotic break.”
According to his mother, Jake began “having some trouble in high school,” when she first noticed her son’s personality changing. Lisa said Jake “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.” After taking Jake to see a doctor, who believed he may have bipolar disorder, Jake was prescribed several medications, but nothing seemed to work. Jake went on to graduate from high school in 2007, and after a semester and a half at college, he dropped out and moved in with his mother in Indiana. In 2008, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Videos by PopCulture.com
Lisa, who said that her son previously spent 10 months in jail after leading deputies on a multi-county chase before wrecking his car in 2015, told Scripps that Jake had a mental break in March 2023. While driving home from McDonald’s, Lisa said her son “wanted to turn the car off. And he turned the car off in the middle of the three lanes, and we were in the middle lane.” She recalled how there “was a lot of yelling and screaming.”
“The police got there, and they asked Jake some questions,” she continued. “He was talking to them, but none of it made sense. It was all word salad.”
Jake was ultimately admitted to a mental health rehabilitation facility, where he is currently about 10 months into an 18-month stay. According to his mother, Jake is “doing much better than I expected.”
“He is relating to people better and becoming a little bit more social, which is really nice,” Lisa shared. “It’s kind of like having more of the old Jake back, because he has always been incredibly social until he became schizophrenic.”
According to Lisa, the pair even celebrated Jake’s birthday earlier this month with a trip to the movies to see Wonka. Lisa said her son “really loved it. That was one of the things that we couldn’t do when he was off his medication was watch movies. He just didn’t have the attention span for it.” She also shared that 25 years after starring in Star Wars, Jake is still a fan of the franchise and “loves all the new Star Wars stuff. People think Jake hates Star Wars. He loves it.”
