Jonathan Lipnicki wants you to forget the kid from Jerry Maguire. In Primetime, Lance Oppenheim's new drama about the To Catch a Predator empire, Lipnicki plays a pivotal role opposite Robert Pattinson's Chris Hansen - and according to the former child star, it's the kind of part he never would have landed while living in Los Angeles.
The film, which hit theaters September 23, dramatizes the 2006 moment when Hansen turned an undercover sting operation into a ratings juggernaut - and a cultural lightning rod. Pattinson leads the cast as Hansen, with Merritt Wever as Andie Bender, Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb, Phoebe Bridgers as Del, Matthew Maher as Xavier Von Erck, Bokeem Woodbine as Cortland Gunn, Alex Winter as Bill Conradt, and Anna Faris as Mary Hansen. The 110-minute thriller currently sits at 6.8/10 on TMDb.
A Career Pivot Years in the Making
Lipnicki's path from Stuart Little to Oppenheim's morally complicated drama wasn't a straight line. The actor has spent the better part of two decades quietly dismantling the child-star narrative - taking oddball indie roles, dipping into horror, and generally refusing to play the nostalgia game. Primetime represents his most high-profile dramatic swing yet, and he's been candid that stepping away from Hollywood's gravitational pull was essential to getting there.
"I had to leave to remember why I wanted to do this at all," Lipnicki said of his decision to relocate. Los Angeles, he explained, had become a hall of mirrors - auditions that felt like auditions for the person he used to be rather than the actor he was becoming. Walking away from the city where he'd grown up on soundstages gave him the distance to approach material like Primetime without the baggage of a comeback narrative hanging over every take.
The irony isn't lost on him. Oppenheim's film is, at its core, about the machinery of television fame - how a man with a microphone and a hidden camera became a household name by turning other people's worst moments into entertainment. Lipnicki knows a thing or two about being a face the public thinks it owns.
Inside the 'Primetime' Machine
Oppenheim, the documentarian behind Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, makes his narrative feature debut with Primetime, and the casting reads like a deliberate provocation. Pattinson - a genuine movie star who has spent years sprinting away from franchise safety - as Hansen is the kind of against-the-grain choice that suggests the film isn't interested in hagiography or hit job, but something stranger. Bridgers, the Grammy-nominated musician, appears as Del, while Stranger Things alum Gisondo and character actor Maher round out a cast that mixes indie credibility with mainstream recognition.
The supporting ensemble is stacked with performers who thrive in tonal gray zones: Wever, Woodbine, Winter, Faris. That lineup hints at a movie more interested in the ecosystem around Hansen - the decoys, the producers, the targets, the fallout - than in a simple portrait of the host himself.
Lipnicki hasn't revealed specifics about his character, but he's described the shoot as the most demanding of his career. Working opposite Pattinson, he said, meant scenes that required precision rather than charm - a different muscle than the one he built as a kid.
Why the Exit Mattered
There's a version of Lipnicki's story that's purely about escape - the child actor who fled the industry, returned older and grittier, and got his redemption arc in a prestige drama. He resists that framing. Leaving L.A., he suggested, wasn't about rejecting Hollywood but about building a life sturdy enough to survive it. The distance made him a better collaborator, he said, and a less frightened one.
Primetime arrives at a moment when the true-crime boom has made everyone an amateur detective and every scandal a limited series waiting to happen. A movie about the birth of that appetite - and the man who fed it - feels less like a period piece than a mirror. Whether audiences are ready to watch Pattinson deliver "why don't you take a seat" is another question entirely.
The film is now playing in theaters. Lipnicki, for his part, seems less interested in proving he belongs in the room than in choosing which rooms to enter at all - a lesson, he implied, that only came after he left.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
