From Child Star To Teen Tragedy
For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Jonathan Brandis was one of the most promising child stars in Hollywood, and his role as Bastian Bux in The NeverEnding Story II was supposed to cement him as a bankable teen heartthrob. Worst of all, it almost did—but his fame was also his curse, and in 2003, tragedy took him.
1. He Was A Baby Actor
Born in April 1976, in Connecticut, Brandis was so cute he seemed destined for stardom. Seeing their adorable, open-faced child, Brandis’s parents began putting Jonathan in print commercials starting from when he was two years old. By the age of four, he was appearing in television commercials—and for now, the only way to go was up.
2. His Family Gave Up Everything For Fame
At the tender age of six, Brandis nabbed the role of Kevin Buchanan in One Life to Live. It spurred a drastic change for his family. Deciding to gamble on their son’s charisma, they packed up and moved from the East Coast to Los Angeles three years later, and soon Jonathan was a regular guest star on shows like The Wonder Years and Full House.
Soon after, the opportunity of his young life opened up.
3. He Had His Eyes On A Part
In the late 80s, producers began casting about for child actors for the upcoming sequel to The NeverEnding Story, subtitled The Next Chapter. After all, the first film had been made six years earlier, so all the original actors had aged out of their roles. Brandis jumped into the auditioning process—with an important goal in mind.
4. He Wanted To Grow Up
For some time now, the 13-year-old Brandis had been trying to grow out of the childlike roles that had sustained him in the 80s and into more teenaged fare. He had even tried out for the high school sitcom Saved by the Bell and was considered for a part, only for casting directors to ultimately pass him over.
If he won a part in The NeverEnding Story II, it would give him a grown-up part and more exposure. It went better than he could have imagined.
5. He Won A Lead Part
Over 600 children and young actors auditioned for the limited parts available in The NeverEnding Story II, but it was Jonathan Brandis who landed the lead role of Bastian Balthazar Bux, the lonely pre-teen who finds himself literally absorbed in a book and ends up in the magical world of Fantasia.
Still, the production was no walk in the park.
6. He Had To Think On His Feet
The film’s director, George T Miller, was concerned about child actor labor rules delaying things on set. His solution was nerve-wracking. To speed things up, Miller insisted that Brandis and his co-stars only rehearse scenes once before filming, and often had up to three cameras in their faces when they did film in order to get all the angles simultaneously.
Yet Brandis was already turning his experiences into another step up.
7. He Was In A Horror Classic
Although The NeverEnding Story II under-performed at the box office, Brandis’s star was still on the rise, and the same year the film came out he played the young version of “Stuttering Bill” Denbrough in the indelibly terrifying mini-series of Stephen King’s It, with Tim Rice notably playing Pennywise.
Brandis later called it the hardest role he’d ever played, particularly when it came to getting Bill’s stuttering right. But his biggest transformation was just around the corner.
8. He Had One Flaw
For much of his teen acting career, casting directors often pointed out Brandis’s height—or lack thereof. When he made Sidekicks in 1992, co-starring with Chuck Norris, he was reported to be just 5 feet, 4 inches. Before long, however, Brandis hit a true growth spurt, and eventually hit 5 feet, 9 inches. That wasn’t the only thing that changed.
9. He Worked With Steven Spielberg
1993 was the year that everything changed for Jonathan Brandis. After his successful and growing film career, he landed a role on SeaQuest DSV, which was eventually renamed to SeaQuest 2032. The science fiction show, set aboard a futuristic submarine, attracted Steven Spielberg as an executive producer and saw Brandis playing the teen genius Lucas Wolenczak.
A television series was a chance for Brandis to settle into steady acting. Only, that’s not how it went.
10. He Turned Into A Teen Idol Overnight
SeaQuest DSV’s first season proved immensely popular—and Brandis was most popular of all, even next to veteran co-star Roy Scheider. Teen girls in particular tuned into SeaQuest DSV to see Brandis, who had now grown into a lank, fair-haired heartthrob, and soon enough teen magazine Tiger Beat voted him the “No 1 Dreamboat.”
It didn’t stop there.
11. He Needed Bodyguards
Eventually, Brandis grew so famous among young girls that they started showing up to the set of SeaQuest DSV to catch a glimpse of him. That wasn’t all. They came in such droves and were so enthusiastic, he needed three studio security guards to escort him off set each day. The strangeness kept coming.
12. He Got Droves Of Fan Mail
Brandis had been a working actor since he was a toddler, but nothing could have prepared him for the avalanche of attention that came from his role as Lucas Wolenczak. In addition to the crowds gathering everywhere he went and the interviews in teen magazines, he also got up to 4,000 fan mail letters per week.
It took a toll on him.
13. He Was Overwhelmed
In interviews during this time, Brandis seemed something like a deer in the headlights when it came to his immense overnight fame. "I never perceived myself like this—a teen magazine kid,” he once said, "As an actor, you just hope to continue working…I sure never knew it was coming.”
Overwhelming as it was, Brandis still took advantage of it.
14. He Tried To Stay Grounded
According to Brandis’s SeaQuest co-star Roy Scheider, Brandis mostly had a good head on his shoulders about his newfound fame. As Scheider noted, “he takes his incredible popularity with a grain of salt”. However, Scheider did add one confession: “...other than the fact he uses it to get girls!”
In fact, Brandis’s love life was heating up.
15. He Met Someone
By 1995, Jonathan Brandis was the teen heartthrob, and at 19 he had finally fully escaped his child stardom, even if teen stardom had its own problems, too. To go along with this, he began a relationship with Fresh Prince of Bel Air actress Tatyana Ali—though their relationship had ups and downs from the start.
16. He Had An “Uncomfortable” Meeting
When Ali and Brandis first met at a friend’s Halloween party in 1993, Ali was only 14 years old, while Brandis was 17. More than that big age gap, Brandis’s fame also eclipsed Ali’s. So although there was mutual interest, Ali played it safe. As she commented, “He was older, probably a lot more experienced. It was uncomfortable”.
It took a good while for that to change.
17. He Made It Official
Two years after their first meeting, when Brandis was 19 and Ali had turned 16, the pair finally got over their hesitations and officially got together. Naturally, Hollywood immediately pounced on the new couple, and they became pop culture royalty, heightening both their profiles at once. This wasn’t a good thing.
18. They Were A Heat Score
At the time, Brandis couldn’t go anywhere without young women recognizing him and going into fits. At the same time, Ali was a star in her own right and commanding her own attention. As Brandis complained in a 1996 interview with People, “We go to a club, and nine times out of 10 there’s a guy there hitting on her”.
It was a lot of pressure on the young stars, and more stress was to come.
19. He Was On A Nightmare Set
Brandis had made his name on SeaQuest, but the show itself was a disaster behind the scenes. Although the first season was incredibly popular and turned him into a star, by the pilot episode two executive producers had already quit, and there were rumors the cast, the studio NBC, and the remaining producers were at odds.
But when it came to workplace drama, Brandis hadn’t seen anything yet.
20. His Job Moved
The second season of SeaQuest was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because there was a second season, and a curse because the production issues continued, especially after NBC decided to rejig the show’s format and relocate from Los Angeles to Orlando. Suddenly, Brandis’s livelihood—and home—was up in the air.
21. His Colleagues Dropped Like Flies
It wasn’t just the show’s set that changed. The studio also shuffled up cast members left, right, and center, pushing two actors out of their roles. It got worse. Two other cast members left of their own accord, citing not only the move to Orlando but also the same cast and production tensions that had already plagued the first season.
Brandis, though, got lucky.
22. They Wanted To Use Him
One of the reasons NBC wanted to rejig the show was actually because of Brandis. Thanks to his immense success following season 1 of SeaQuest, they wanted season 2 to star an even younger cast, and were likely hoping to draw in an even bigger portion of the teen audience. As such, unlike many of his castmates, Brandis got to keep his job throughout the chaos.
He also got something else entirely.
23. He Took On New Roles
SeaQuest wasn’t a steady place for Brandis to work, but it did push him to new heights in his career. Producers let Brandis, as one of their biggest stars, actually write an episode of the second season, “The Siamese Dream,” which appeared as episode 20.
But although Brandis could control one episode, he couldn’t control the trainwreck that was the show as a whole.
24. His Co-Star Stormed Off
If SeaQuest’s strong start in season 1 began to crumble under all the backstage issues, season 2 let those issues fester. Then, by season 3, it was in a full blown crisis. Producers kept changing much of the concept and setting of the show, and it got so bad that Brandis’s co-star, lead actor Roy Scheider, fought with producers to release him from his contract.
The damage was done: Though Brandis’s teen idol status continued, SeaQuest began to plummet.
25. He Was The Last One Standing
By the time the third season aired, Brandis was the only cast member to appear in every episode, and only one of three actors on the show to have been with it since the beginning. Brandis may have felt he owed NBC; they had taken a chance on him and even allowed him to write a television episode. But in the end, the studio betrayed him too.
26. They Canceled Him
By all accounts, Brandis was a consummate professional who came to work each day on SeaQuest hoping to bring all he could to the role. All it gave him back was a cruel shock. Partly thanks to all the changes on the show, SeaQuest was hemorrhaging its audience, and NBC axed it abruptly right in the middle of the third season.
Still, Brandis had a bright future in front of him. Or so everyone thought.
27. He Was With The In Crowd
To be fair, few people could see the end coming at this point: Brandis left SeaQuest at the height of his career, and he was firmly embedded in the social circles of some of the hottest young stars of the 90s. In particular, he was close with his fellow child star Soleil Moon Frye, who gained fame as the titular character in Punky Brewster.
Other things in his life were looking up, too.
28. He Made It Work
Over the next handful of years, Brandis put together an impressively consistent string of roles, first in television films and then in supporting roles in cinematic releases like Outside Providence and Ride with the Devil in the late 90s. For an actor who only wanted to work, it was what Brandis needed most. But even that was about to falter.
29. His Career Took A Dip
At the turn of the new millennium, Brandis’s career began to sputter. Although Outside Providence and Ride with the Devil were traditional theater releases, his next role in Bad Girls from Valley High had difficulty even finding a distributor, and hung in release limbo for years. The biggest blows were yet to come.
30. He Went Through A Brutal Breakup
It wasn’t just Brandis’s professional life that began taking hits; his personal life also suffered a catastrophe. In 2001, after six years of dating, he and Tatyana Ali called it quits. Although the couple kept the reasons for their split private, it certainly isolated Brandis in a crucial moment of his life. One where he would need a friend.
31. He Got New Hope
In 2002, Brandis picked up a supporting role in 2002’s Hart’s War, starring heavy-hitter Bruce Willis and rising actor Colin Farrell. It looked to be a stroke of luck just when he needed it most, and, perhaps best of all, it was obviously destined for a feature film release. But when the final edits came in, Brandis got gut-wrenching news.
32. His Dreams Were Crushed
By now, Brandis was hanging many hopes for his career—and his happiness—on Hart’s War. So when he found out that his work was reduced to a miniscule part, he was gutted. He ended up appearing only in a deleted scene in the official release.
Brandis must have felt he was back at square one, but he got up one more time.
33. He Tried To Go Back To TV
In 2003, Brandis threw his hat in the television ring once more when he won a part in 111 Gramercy Park, a show starring legends like Tippi Hedren and Jaleel White—best known as Family Matters’ Urkel—and following a group of maintenance and cleaning staff at a luxury apartment complex.
With the role secured, now all Brandis had to do was film the pilot and hope it got picked up. But his hardships were already taking their toll.
34. He Was Obsessive
Brandis’s Gramercy Park co-star Jaleel White later described the actor's state of mind during the filming of the pilot. His revelations were heartbreaking. Reportedly, Brandis was on continual edge about if the show would make it to air. As White noted, "I've never known an actor to ask me repeatedly about our pickup prospects the way he did when we shot [the show]”.
Tragically, it was all for nothing.
35. He Was Lost
In the end, a network never picked up 111 Gramercy Park, and Brandis once again felt untethered from the entertainment world—the world that had been the only reality he’d ever known. With Bad Girls from Valley High still in production purgatory and few offers coming through to him, Brandis began truly spiraling.
36. He Took Up Dangerous Habits
Even before the loss of Gramercy Park, perhaps around the whittling of his role in Hart’s War, Brandis responded to his “failures” in destructive ways. According to those closest to him, he began drinking heavily, and these habits only fueled the sinking depression and loneliness he was already feeling.
It all led to one breath-taking confession.
37. He Opened Up To His Friends
Friends report that around this time, when Brandis was obviously at his lowest, he told multiple people that he was thinking of taking his own life. For those who knew how “polite” and “easygoing” he was, this seemed almost unbelievable—even with the pressures he was facing in his career and personal life.
Besides, he had one more bright spot coming up.
38. He Got Another Chance
Despite his private demons, Brandis was still marching on in his career, and in 2003 he got a part—a meaty one this time, as a CIA hitman—in Puerto Vallarta Squeeze alongside veteran actor Harvey Keitel. He packed away his issues for the work, and reports from set were that he was once more a total professional. Even Keitel took note.
39. He Impressed His Co-Star
Harvey Keitel was incredibly impressed watching his young co-star work. According to a producer on the film, Robert Katz, Keitel couldn’t help noting to him on multiple occasions, “This kid is good”. Even in the editing room, Katz admitted that everyone was saying, “This guy’s going to have a big career”.
If only Brandis believed that himself.
40. He Lost Hope
By November 2003, Puerto Vallarta Squeeze had already wrapped, and Brandis should have been hoping for all the opportunities it would bring him. There was just one problem. He had been here before, with all these hopes, only to have them smashed. Apparently, it was all too much for him. His next act was a true tragedy.
41. His Friends Found Him
Just before midnight on November 11, 2003, friends entered Jonathan Brandis’s Los Angeles apartment and made a horrific discovery: They found him hanging in the hallway. Panicked and upset, they called 9-1-1, and medical responders rushed Brandis to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to save his life. But it was too late.
42. He Took His Own Life
Brandis may have clung feebly on to life that night, but by the next day doctors announced that he had passed at the age of 27. The shockwaves were immense. His Puerto Vallarta Squeeze producer Robert Katz said his first response was “No, no no, wrong guy,” while 111 Gramercy Park co-star Jaleel White said, “I stared at my computer screen, tears rolling down my face”.
They weren’t the only ones.
43. His Ex Was Angry
Brandis’s ex Tatyana Ali reacted to his death differently than White or Katz. After some time had passed, she reportedly admitted she was “angry” with him initially—perhaps an understandable first reaction when they had only broken up a couple years before, and after a long relationship. One friend, however, struggled with intense guilt.
44. One Of His Famous Friends Missed The Signs
Brandis’s old friend Soleil Moon Frye confessed that she “had some elements of guilt” about not properly seeing what he was going through, and not reaching out to him, when she had the chance, to actually “really hear what someone is saying”. But in the end, she did give a beautiful tribute to her lost friend.
45. He Appeared In A Documentary
In 2021, Soleil Moon Frye created the documentary Kid 90, which contained footage of the extensive home videos she took from her years in Hollywood in the 90s. Brandis appears frequently in this footage, and the documentary gave his memory new life.
Even so, this didn’t erase the pain of his loss for his family, or their suspicions around his death.
46. His Family Didn’t Blame Hollywood
The same year that Kid 90 came out, Brandis’s father Greg finally spoke about his son’s death. Surprisingly, despite Jonathan’s struggles with the volatility of fame in his career, Greg Brandis explicitly said his son’s passing “wasn’t due to the entertainment industry”.
The culprit he pointed to was the biggest bombshell of all.
47. He May Have Had A Mental Illness
Rather than blaming Hollywood for Jonathan’s tragic end, his father believed a previously undiagnosed mental illness was responsible. Greg Brandis admitted, “I look back now, and in his 20s he showed signs of manic depression”. As a result, Greg believes that bipolar disorder is part of what drove Brandis to take his own life.
48. His Projects Kept Coming Out
Brandis’s memory haunted the film world in the months and years after his sad end. Puerto Vallarta Squeeze came out posthumously in 2004, and in 2005 his long-delayed work in Bad Girls from Valley High was finally released direct-to video. He lingered in other ways, too.
49. He Lives On In People’s Memories
Although Brandis has been gone for decades, his father still remembers him each and every day, and even communicates with him. As he said in a 2021 interview, "I talk to him and it makes me smile. I get the feeling he's looking down at me”.
50. He Can Still Help People
Brandis’s legacy is full of the ups and downs of Hollywood life, from the highs of teen stardom to the lows of scraping together roles, all amidst his struggles with mental health. But it was not a wasted legacy, and his father Greg hopes that when people read Brandis’s story, “anyone suffering can go get help”.
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Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17