“Jerry Maguire”'s Jonathan Lipnicki Was 'Very Lucky' with His Movie Parents Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger (Exclusive)

Jonathan Lipnicki has had a lot of costars in his long career, but four in particular stick out.

“I always say I got very lucky with the parents that I had,” the 34-year-old actor tells PEOPLE exclusively. His very first film was 1996’s Jerry Maguire, in which he played the son of Renée Zellweger’s Dorothy and, later, Tom Cruise’s title character. Then, in 1999’s Stuart Little, his movie parents were Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie. “And they’re incredible,” the actor says.

One of his other child costars was a little more nebulous — the mouse brother Stuart Little. “I got really good at talking to a piece of tape and a laser dot,” Lipnicki says. “They had a little miniature at one point that was what they thought it would look like, but there was a lot of make-believe and a lot of play there.”

Lipnicki says his actual parents also did a great job navigating his days as a child star; he calls them “anti-stage parents.” He first started acting when his older sister took a class. “We practiced these things called auditions, and I told my parents I really wanted to do it,” he says. Eventually, they caved and let him audition.

“I booked a few national commercials or something like that, and then I ended up getting Jerry Maguire, and then I just really realized I loved it,” he says. “And after every time I did a movie, my parents would ask me if I was still happy and if I still wanted to be doing it, and the answer was yes. And to this day, I love acting.”

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His parents let him choose roles, too. “We'd talk about everything that came through and if it was something I wanted to do. They fostered my creativity. Especially my mom was really, day-to-day, fostering my creativity, making sure I was comfortable and happy, and supporting me in chasing this dream.”

And their relationship hasn’t changed. “My mom still supports me. I still run lines with my mom,” he says. Though child stardom is a “weird situation” with “no handbook,” he says his parents did “an amazing job.” He also credits his parents’ decision to send him to public school and letting him really focus on high school. In his 20s, he also decided to take acting classes again to hone his craft.

Lipnicki stars in the newest season of TBS’ The Joe Schmo Show, a hoax reality show in which everyone but one contestant is in on the prank. In the new season, which features the fake game show The GOAT, Lipnicki plays a fictionalized version of himself who’s a massive jerk. Lipnicki ultimately relished the chance to play the bad boy version of himself.

“As an actor growing up in this industry, you want to be on your best behavior, and I got to be on my worst,” he says. “I think there was something empowering about that, in a weird way.”

The hardest part of being part of the fake show, he says, was “the other people. They're so funny. There's a few times I've bit the inside of my cheeks because they're so good and they're so funny that it's hard not to laugh.” He also struggled to be mean to Ben Frisone, the hoax’s target, who he says is “a really nice guy.”

But overall, Lipnicki says, being on the series was “a step in the right direction” for his career.

The Joe Schmo Show airs Tuesdays on TBS.

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