The former child star plays one of the men caught in the sting central to A24's drama about the making and cancellation of To Catch a Predator.
Jonathan Lipnicki just took the biggest swing of his career, and he did it with his clothes off.
The 35-year-old actor, still best remembered for his child roles in the 1990s, plays a character called Crazyfrog73 in A24's Primetime, a drama about the making of To Catch a Predator and the final sting operation that got the show pulled off air. Crazyfrog73 is one of the men caught in that sting. In the scene, he walks into the house and drops his pants right away, in front of Skyler Gisondo's character Dan, who's playing decoy for the first time. There's no cutaway. The camera stays.
Lipnicki told The Hollywood Reporter he laughed when he first heard what the scene required. Then the nerves kicked in.
"I laughed, but it also gave me a lot of anxiety," he said. "It's a crazy thing to wrap your brain around. As actors, we pray for dark material and for things we can really sink our teeth into. You have to ask yourself, 'Am I as courageous an artist as I say I am?' I had to answer that question, and I was courageous enough to take the plunge."
He's done nudity before, in the stage production Lost Girls, so baring it all wasn't new territory by itself. What made this different, he said, was stacking the nudity on top of the character.
"The pedophile element by itself is terrifying to tackle, and then you add the nudity," Lipnicki said. "Not only are you a pedophile, you're a naked, full-frontal pedophile. It was intimidating, to say the least. Even after I shot it, I thought, 'I really hope I made the right decision.'"
He's landed on a working philosophy for picking projects since. "I've tried to live by the idea that, on art, if something scares you, most likely you should do it," he told THR.
Primetime has already stirred plenty of talk online about how a scripted film should handle the ethics of a reality show built on entrapment. Lipnicki's casting adds a different wrinkle to that conversation. Here's an actor known for a certain kind of wholesome nostalgia, playing one of the men the original show existed to catch, and doing it as nakedly as the format allows.
No release date for Primetime has been confirmed yet. What's clear from Lipnicki's account is that this isn't a cameo he's treating lightly. Whether the scene lands as bold filmmaking or just uncomfortable viewing will depend entirely on how A24 cuts it together, and on how far the rest of the cast, including Gisondo, went along with him.
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