Justin Cooper, who played Jim Carrey’s son in the 1997 film “Liar Liar,” says that during his childhood acting career he received fan letters mailed from prison, mail his mother kept hidden from him until years later.
Cooper, now grown, discussed the experience on the “Not So Little Rascals” podcast with co-hosts Jordan Warkol and Blake Collins. He said his mother did a “really good job” shielding him from the darker corners of the entertainment industry while he was working as a child actor, but that some of what she screened out only came to light later.
“She would tell me later on about, like, prison mail that I would get that she never showed me,” Cooper said, adding that the letters came from “people in jail.”
“Dudes in jail talking about how they’re such a big fan of me … and you’re such a cute kid,” he remembered.
Cooper credited his mother’s vigilance for keeping him safe on set. “She never, ever left me alone with anybody on set,” he said, contrasting her approach with other stage parents of the era. “There’s a lot of acting parents that you hear of back in the day that are just like, ‘OK, ya, go. Do whatever they tell you to do. Bye!’ and my mom was not like that. Almost to a fault.”
He recalled one example involving Don Rickles, who played Mr. Wilson in “Dennis the Menace Strikes Again.” “He’s known for being a, you know, foul-mouthed comic,” Cooper said. “She went up to him and, is like, ‘I don’t want you to use any language like that in front of my kid.'”
Cooper eventually stepped away from acting when the grind of auditions began competing with an ordinary teenage life. “You’ve got to sit in the car for 45, 50 minutes to get out there, and then I’ve got to do this, and then I gotta go home and start my homework, and I want to just go home right now and talk to girls on AIM,” he said.
His mother ultimately gave him the choice to quit. “After a while of me kind of just being like, I got another audition, my mom was like, ‘Look, if you don’t want to do it anymore, you don’t have to,'” Cooper recalled.
He worried his decision might have disappointed her, given how closely tied she was to his career. “My relationship with my mom was great for most of the time,” he said. “In high school it got a little strange … I stopped acting, I started smoking weed.” He said she eventually found his “stash,” which “put a little strain” on the relationship for a time.
Still, he reflected warmly on her role throughout his acting years. “Throughout my whole acting phase, she was always there … taking me on auditions, all the stuff, helping me, running lines,” Cooper said.
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