Where the Hell Has Joseph Gordon-Levitt Been?

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 10, 2019 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 10, 2019 |

Everyone remembers Joseph Gordon-Levitt, right? Huge movie star, known for roles in Inception, (500) Days of Summer, Premium Rush, 50/50, 10 Things I Hate About You, all the Rian Johnson movies (including a cameo in Star Wars: The Last Jedi). He even did five seasons on a sitcom called Third Rock from the Sun.

What happened to that guy? Dude used to be one of the biggest draws in Hollywood, but his last major feature was the 2016 Oliver Stone flick, Snowden, which crapped out at the box office, scoring only $21 million domestic. No one has seen much of Joseph Gordon-Levitt publicly since. Did Oliver Stone secrete him away? Did Snowden perform so badly that JGL’s career tanked? Has he become so consumed with HitRecord that he’s completely given up acting?

None of the above! Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been on a three-year break of his own making. JGL got married in 2014 to Tasha McCauley [pictured above at a Seth Rogen Halloween charity event] — a scientist and the CEO of a robotics company — and they had a baby in 2015 and another in 2017. That’s what Gordon-Levitt has been doing the last few years: He took time off to raise his kids.

“I had a really fortunate run for a few years there,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt told Dax Shepard on this week’s Armchair Expert podcast. “And then I decided to take a few years off because I wanted to have kids … I couldn’t pass up the experience. I have these babies here. I’m not going to go to work. I have the privilege that I can do that. Not everybody has that privilege. If I do have that ability — I can afford to take time off work — I’m going to.”

“Going into it,” he added, “I was betting that experientially, I’m going to get a lot out of this, and even just in the present sense, there’s going to be a lot of rewarding moments if I just hang out with this kid, and then this second kid.”

JGL, however, tells Shepard that he doesn’t like to talk too much about his kids, because he doesn’t “want them to feel exposed … I want that to be their choice.” In fact, JGL is so protective of his private life that the names of his children have not been made public.

That said, JGL does have some apprehension about how his career will fare when he returns. “When I decided to take that time off, you could say the amount of jobs I was being offered are different than they are now, having taken a few years off, which is nerve-wracking to say the least.” JGL is hopeful, though, because this is not the first time he’s quit the business for a few years. He actually left Third Rock from the Sun in its final season to attend college.

“Well, it worked once,” he told Shepard. “I quit. I was on a sitcom and was offered other sitcoms and I decided to quit … and it worked out. So I am in that place again, and I’m going to hold tight, and it’s going to happen again.” That said, insecurities still occasionally surface. “In less practical moments, I just think, ‘F*ck. I blew it. I got off the train and I shouldn’t have. I got cocky. I shouldn’t have done that. The kids would have been fine!”

If I’m JGL, however, I wouldn’t worry too much. He’s already shot an untitled sci-fi film with Jamie Foxx, he’s lined up a role in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 alongside Seth Rogen, Eddie Redmayne, and Sacha Baron Cohen, and he’s directing an R-rated musical comedy that he co-wrote, which will star himself and Channing Tatum. We’ll be seeing plenty of JGL in the future.

In the meantime, he also has a new 10-episode podcast series out now called Creative Processing, which features guests like Seth Rogen and Rian Johnson.

Source: Armchair Expert