Jake Lloyd

On June 17, 2015, Jake Lloyd found himself back in the headlines when he was arrested for reckless driving, driving without a license, and for resisting arrest. His arrest followed after a high-speed car chase for 25 miles at Charleston, South Carolina, that ended with him crashing his car into a tree.

After spending ten months in jail, he was moved from the jail to a psychiatric center in April 2016, after he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental disorder characterized by abnormal social behavior and failure to understand what is real. He is still in the facility with no release date set.

Jake felt so much anger towards the film ‘The Phantom Menace’, that he destroyed all his Star Wars memorabilia. “I've learned to hate it when the cameras are pointed at me,” he said in an interview. His mother said in an interview that he doesn't like to watch the film anymore, and that he blames director George Lucas for his downfall.

Jake Lloyd was born on March 5, 1989 in Fort Collins, Colorado. His father is William "Bill" Lloyd, an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), and his mother is Lisa Riley, an entertainment agent.

Jake Lloyd started his acting career in 1996, when he portrayed Jimmy Sweet in four episodes of ‘ER’, an American medical drama television series created by novelist and medical doctor Michael Crichton. It aired on NBC from September 1994 to April 2009.

After his television debut, he made his way to the silver screen in ‘Unhook the Stars’, where he played Jake Warren. It was a 1996 American drama film directed by Nick Cassavetes. In the same year, he played Ronnie Collins/Young Angelo /Timmy in four episodes of ‘The Pretender,’ an American action television series, aired on NBC from 1996 to 2000.

He got his big break when he was cast as Jamie Langston in ‘Jingle All the Way’, an American Christmas family comedy film directed by Brian Levant and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sinbad.

Jake Lloyd also portrayed Mark Armstrong in ‘Apollo 11’, a television film that aired in November 1996 on The Family Channel. The film was nominated for a Primetime Emmy.

He gained worldwide attention when he was chosen by George Lucas, an American filmmaker and entrepreneur, to play young Anakin Skywalker, a young slave with unusually strong natural powers of the Force, in his 1999 film ‘Star Wars: Episode I –The Phantom Menace’, the first film in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. This epic space opera film was written and directed by George Lucas, and produced by Lucasfilm.