Lizzie McGuire star reveals parents 'worked in a bar' during Disney Channel fame
The 35-year-old actor - who is the son of former radio host Bob Thomas and actress Sinns Thomas - was cast opposite Hilary Duff in the comedy series Lizzie McGuire in the early 2000s, and is still "super grateful" for how his parents gave up their own careers in Tennessee so he could pursue acting in LA.
Speaking on the Zach Sang Show, he explained: "My parents were still acting and writing. My dad wrote two episodes of Lizzie McGuire, but the focus definitely started to become giving me the best shot possible. I am super, super grateful and thankful that they did that for me. They gave me the best opportunity to get where I am today. It's massive. Massive.
"I recongised too,that when I was following along on this success, they had to make sacrifices in their own lives to help support that. You're a kid, you've got to have your parent there the entire time and they're not getting paid to be there.
"My parents have never really talked about this, but they took [jobs] waiting tables, nightshifts, while I was on a TV show, just so that one of them was always earning income and keeping health insurance and stuff like that.
During that time, Jake - who also appeared opposide Jude Law in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and in more recent years has become a director - "hadn't realised" that his parents had given up so much for them, but now admits that he "can never thank them enough" for what they did.
"Looking back on that now, I hadn't realised that growing up, but they worked at the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal Studios. I have memories of us going to Universal and meeting my mom, and she'd still be in her waitress uniform smelling of french fries and we'd pick her up from work go home.
"Now, looking back on that, I'm like 'You went from being on TV, local celebrity to doing this...' Sacrificing that essentially so I could continue my career. I can never thank them enough."
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Spielberg initially planned to use renowned stop-motion clay animation artist Phil Tippett to create the dinosaurs roaming the island theme park. Visual effects artist Dennis Muren proposed an alternative method, using Industrial Light & Magic's computer-generated imagery to create realistic dinosaurs. The director is an executive producer in Jurassic World: Rebirth which reaches theatres on July 2. "That kind of made certain careers somewhat extinct," Spielberg said. "So, I'm very sensitive to things that AI may do to take work away from people." Spielberg said he has yet to use AI on any of his films so far although he is open to possible applications of it behind-the-scenes, in functions like budgeting or planning. "I don't want to use it in front of the camera right now," Spielberg said. "Not quite yet." When Steven Spielberg directed the film AI Artificial Intelligence, the technology was the stuff of science fiction - a device to tell a story about the ethics of creating sentient machines. Now, AI is a concrete reality in Hollywood - one where Spielberg said he has drawn a line in the sand. "I don't want AI making any creative decisions that I can't make myself," Spielberg said in an interview with Reuters. "And I don't want to use AI as a non-human collaborator, in trying to work out my creative thinking." Spielberg spoke on Thursday after a ceremony dedicating the Steven Spielberg Theater on the Universal Studios lot. The event acknowledged the director's decades-long relationship with the studio, which released such films as Jaws, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The acclaimed director joked that his career at Universal began in 1967, when he took a tour of the lot as a high school student. He said he hid in the bathroom during a break, and waited for the tour to move on without him, "then I had the entire lot to myself that day". "Our hope and dream is that it's not just the place that is founded on his extraordinary legacy," said Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment & Studios. "But it is the place of future hopes and dreams of filmmakers and storytellers who are going to take this company into the next 100 years and the 100 years after that, people who come with a hope and a dream, people who have been inspired by Steven." Spielberg's 2001 modest box office hit AI Artificial Intelligence was a meditation on love, loss and what it means to be human through the eyes of a discarded humanoid robot. In the Pinocchio-like journey set in a futuristic dystopia, David, the android boy, yearns to be human, searching for love, in a world of machines and artificial intelligence. 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Spielberg initially planned to use renowned stop-motion clay animation artist Phil Tippett to create the dinosaurs roaming the island theme park. Visual effects artist Dennis Muren proposed an alternative method, using Industrial Light & Magic's computer-generated imagery to create realistic dinosaurs. The director is an executive producer in Jurassic World: Rebirth which reaches theatres on July 2. "That kind of made certain careers somewhat extinct," Spielberg said. "So, I'm very sensitive to things that AI may do to take work away from people." Spielberg said he has yet to use AI on any of his films so far although he is open to possible applications of it behind-the-scenes, in functions like budgeting or planning. "I don't want to use it in front of the camera right now," Spielberg said. "Not quite yet."
