Nocturnal 
Justin Cooper was just eight years old when he starred alongside Jim Carrey in Liar Liar — and, according to the actor himself, that’s also around the age he started receiving letters from prison inmates.
Cooper, now 37, played Carrey’s on-screen son Max in the 1997 comedy, which turned him into one of the biggest child stars of the decade. But with that fame came a disturbing downside that he only found out about years later.
Speaking on the “Not So Little Rascals” podcast with hosts Jordan Warkol and Blake Collins, Cooper revealed that his mother had been quietly intercepting “prison mail” sent to him as a child, shielding him from it at the time.
What the letters said
“She would tell me later on about, like, prison mail that I would get that she never showed me,” Cooper said, explaining 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 recalled.
Cooper said his mother worked hard to protect him from the darker side of showbiz throughout his childhood career, describing her efforts as thorough “almost to a fault.”
“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,” he said.
A protective presence on set
According to Cooper, his mother “never, ever” left him alone with anybody while he was working. He also recalled one particular moment that stuck with him — when his mother confronted comedian Don Rickles, who played Mr Wilson in Dennis the Menace Strikes Again, over his famously foul-mouthed reputation.
“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 said.
During the height of his fame, Cooper appeared on shows including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno alongside actress Melissa Joan Hart, and starred in a string of hit ’90s films including the Dennis the Menace sequel.
Why he stepped away from Hollywood
Cooper eventually walked away from acting when the audition grind started to feel more like a chore than a childhood. He said the long car journeys to castings began cutting into 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.
He recalled his mother eventually giving him the choice to quit for good. “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,'” he said.
Cooper admitted he worried his decision to step back from acting might have disappointed his mother, given how closely she was tied to his career throughout his childhood.
As it stands, Cooper has largely left Hollywood behind, with his podcast appearance offering a rare and candid look back at the stranger side of being a child star in the 1990s.
