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 often way 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 principals filthy rich, few more so than former child star Angus T. Jones. He played Jake Harper in the show and was able to reach a level of wealth most of us only experience in our wildest fantasies before vanishing and going completely off the grid, so to speak.
Early Days
Usually, an actor’s early days are a setup. They give hints about things to come, or they provide a surprising foundation for a complete left turn.
With Jones, though, his early days are the story. Born in 1993, he was a child actor who appeared in multiple films, including “See Spot Run,” “The Rookie” and “Bringing Down the House.”
It was an auspicious start for sure, but Jones was just really just getting warmed up. His big break came at the tender age of 10 in 2003 when he joined the case of THF, which catapulted Jones to fame and fortune.
He actually won awards for his acting, too, most notably a pair of Young Artist Award and a TV Land Award. Jones became known for his hilarious one-liners, and by the age of 17 he was earning $350,000 per episode, a serious salary that would eventually lead to estimates that put his net worth around $20 million.
So what happened? Simply put, Jones got religion, and in the worst and most obsessive way possible. He started going to three or four churches every Sunday, until finally he became a Seventh-Day Adventist.
Which would have been fine, more or less, if Jones had been able to keep his beliefs to himself. Instead he panned the show, which also might have been fine had he not encouraged fans to stop watching the show and “filling their heads with filth.”
The producers and cast resented Jones interfering with the flow of their filthy lucre, of course, and he was bounced from the show. Jones eventually came to his senses and apologized, which allowed him to regain a limited role in the final days 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 multimedia and even company started by Kene Orjioke and Justin Combs, but that venture also failed.
Now 28, 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 supposedly 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.
