It’s hard to believe now, but back in the day Two and a Half Men was actually a thing. THF star Charlie Sheen’s rants about having “tiger blood” were more entertaining than the actual show, and despite its offensive title, Two and a Half Men was a huge hit for a long time.
Given the show’s success, it also made most of the main cast filthy rich, few more so than former child star Angus T. Jones. He played Jake Harper on the show and made a nice fortune doing so, enough to vanish and stay out of the media spotlight.
What Happened to him?
Jones became devoutly religious, he started going to three or four churches every Sunday and eventually joined the Seventh-day Adventist church. This would have been fine, if he had been able to keep his beliefs to himself. In an interview, he told fans to stop watching the show as it was “filling their heads with filth.”
The producers and cast members didn’t take this too kindly and Jones left in season 10. He eventually came to his senses and apologized, which allowed him to regain a guest role in the final two seasons of Two and A Half Men.
Life After Two and a Half Men
Armed with a boatload of cash, Jones had big plans when he left the show, but sadly, none of them panned out. He started with the dream of creating “bible-based stories” that had him “sharing the word of God,” but he never found his version of a Christian audience among the God-fearing crowd.
He tried college and environmentalism at the University of Colorado, then changed his major to Jewish studies. Finally, in 2016 he became president of a production company started by Kene Orjioke and Justin Combs, but that venture also failed.
Now 29, Jones is still young enough to make something of his adult life, but he looks nothing like the child star he once was. He surfaced last year in LA sporting long hair and a bushy but scraggly beard, and he’s been spending a lot of time with his brother Otto.
Jones’ one saving grace is his remaining wealth, which remains around $20 million by all accounts. Amidst his business failures and his spectacularly wrong turn into the world of religion, he doesn’t seem to have spent his fortune, so at least he didn’t fall into the kind of profound ruin that plagues some former childhood stars.
He remains an object lesson, though, about the perils of what can happen when you get too much success and money as a child star, and how far you can fall when that combination enters the picture way too soon.
