Jonathan Lipnicki Revisits 'Jerry Maguire' 20 Years Later, From Swapping F-Bombs With Tom Cruise to Fact-Checking Weight of a Human Head
Jonathan Lipnicki was one confident 5-year-old kid — and this was before he became a movie star. After auditioning for the role of the precocious Ray in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, Lipnicki insisted to his mother that the job was his. “And then they cast another kid,” the now-26-year-old Westlake Village, Calif., native told us when he stopped by Yahoo Studios (watch above) to promote the film’s 20th anniversary Blu-ray release.
But as (Lipnicki’s) luck would have it, the first-choice kid didn’t pan out, giving the bespectacled blond youngster a chance to fly to Phoenix where the film was in production and try out for Crowe and Tom Cruise, who starred as the titular sports agent. Lipnicki won the role, and the success of Maguire made him one of the most popular and hardest working child actors of the late-’90s and early-’00s.
Related: Jonathan Lipnicki Admits It’s Been a ‘Rough Transition’ From Child Stardom to Adult Career
Lipnicki, who even at 5 was aware of Cruise because of a love for Top Gun, wasn’t scared about making his acting debut alongside such a renowned celebrity because he had no inhibitions. “Now, I’m more nervous to see him when I see him than I was when I was a little kid,” he said. “Because now I know how big Tom Cruise is.”
Cruise and Lipnicki shared numerous memorable moments together, including one in which Ray calls out Jerry for dropping the F-bomb. It was the first time Lipnicki had ever sworn, and apparently it triggered some controversy. “My mom got a lot of crap for letting me say that as a parent, from radio shows or whatever,” he said. “My mom was like, ‘He’s repeating it and saying it’s not a good thing that he said it. So therefore I’m OK with it.‘”
And then of course there’s that famous exchange in the car when Ray grills Jerry with some trivia and professes the oft-quoted line, “Do you know the human head weighs 8 pounds?” Crowe has said it was Lipnicki who introduced that line into the movie, but the exact details are blurry for the actor. What he does know for sure: “It’s not true. The human head weighs more than 8 pounds,” Lipnicki admitted in the bonus video below before offering an apology for his role in spreading misinformation. “I’m so sorry everyone. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” (According to brainstuff.com, the average human head actually weighs about 10 to 11 pounds.)
Watch Lipnicki reenact the ‘human head’ scene (with a twist):
