Zachery Ty Bryan struggled to find acting work after playing eldest son Brad Taylor for all eight seasons of Home improvement. He opened up about the struggles and the rough descent from teenage fame in a new interview detailing his past as a child and his current life, which is fraught with legal troubles related to domestic violence charges, DUIs and an apparent cryptocurrency scheme . .
The home Improvement It starred Tim Allen and Patricia Richardson as Tim “The Tool Man” and Jill Taylor, the parents of sons Brad (Bryan), Randy (Jonathan Taylor Thomas) and Mark (Taran Noah Smith). Bryan said it was “actually very difficult” to get more acting jobs after Home improvement series finale in 1999, despite the success of the ABC show.
“If you’re on a TV show today, you can be in any movie you want, but back then, it was the opposite,” Bryan said. The Hollywood Reporter. He said there was a stigma around TV stars back then that made it difficult for them to get film roles. It was a strange juxtaposition with being one of the stars of a hit TV series.
“You were stigmatized as a TV star and no matter how good your audition was, you were never going to be taken seriously. But I held on,” he explained. “In the same way, you might get turned down for a bunch of projects, but you could go out at night and hang out with your friends at Mel’s Diner and everyone knows you.”
However, he refers to Home improvement years as “some of the best days” of his life, even though he noted to the press that he started drinking at age 14 while working on the show.
“Back then, I used to go to nightclubs and they would let me in because I was the kid I was Home improvement,” he said. Now, he tries to “stay away from it. I’ve kind of loosened up. I have my routine, I don’t go out and get turned on, and that eliminates a lot of problems.”
On-camera work continued to be hard to come by for the actor, prompting him to move into production in the 2010s. The change was a welcome one for Bryan, who likened being an actor to being an animal in a slaughterhouse in remarks continue to the address THR.
“What drove me to produce is that I got to the point where, as an actor, I felt like I was no longer in control of my career,” he said. “As an actor, you’re like a cow going to the slaughterhouse and you have to rely on so many people, from an agent to a manager to a lawyer. I thought that I don’t necessarily need to act anymore, there are other directions to go.”
He has seen some success as an indie film producer, garnering some good reviews for films such as Kindergarten Professor and Skin. As time went on, the second act in his career was free of the scandals usually associated with former child stars, but that would eventually change. After appearing as a “Hollywood insider” for conservative news outlets like Fox News and Newsmax during Trump’s presidency, Bryan made headlines in 2020 for arrests for domestic violence, DUI, and allegedly scamming people into investing in cryptocurrencies.
Just two weeks after he and ex-wife Carly Matros announced their split in September 2020, Bryan was arrested and charged with strangulation, fourth-degree assault, coercion, menacing, harassment and interfering with the filing of a police report in Oregon. The allegations involved Johnnie Faye Cartwright, not Matros. The strangulation charge was eventually dropped and he pleaded guilty to fourth-degree menacing and assault, both misdemeanors.
He also made millions after investing some of his own Home improvement trust fund in Bitcoin. His First Child Co-star Brock Pierce (the so-called “hippie king of crypto” who served on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation before the cryptocurrency crash of 2022) briefed him on Bitcoin’s prospects. Bryan then helped ag tech startup Producers Market recruit investors. Some of those investors said THR later they felt cheated by Bryan and his crypto promises.
Allen said THR, “I don’t know what’s going on with him” in response to his legal troubles. “Zach is a great kid who has grown into a complex man. All you can do is step aside and let someone go through their process.”
“At some point, he went from the guy I know to someone who reacts to situations that I have nothing to do with and that I can’t control,” Allen continued. “I don’t know what happens when people are corrupt. You just don’t know.”