Matilda child star now lives very different life after leaving Hollywood

Ask a group of millennials to list their ultimate childhood films, and one of them is bound to say the 1996 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda.

The iconic fantasy comedy flick, directed by none other than Golden Globe winner Danny DeVito, starred child prodigy Mara Wilson as the titular neglected character who found a true parent in her school teacher, Miss Jennifer Honey (played by Embeth Davidtz).

Other iconic stars, like Rhea Perlman, Paul Reubens and Tracey Walter, appeared alongside a host of kids, including Jimmy Karz, whose life after leaving Hollywood almost a decade ago looks very different.

Karz, who is now 41, was born in Los Angeles in July 1984. He is best known for portraying Bruce Bogtrotter, an 11-year-old Crunchem Hall Elementary School student, in Matilda.

Jimmy Karz played Bruce Bogtrotter in 1996’s Matilda (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

The character, who lived on the same street as the deuteragonist Lavender (Kiami Davael), is fondly remembered for helping his classmates catch a newt to put in Miss Trunchbull’s (Pam Ferris) drink.

You may also know him for stuffing a large amount of chocolate cake down his gullet, which eventually led to Matilda and some of her classmates being put in the ‘Chokey’ after school.

Karz was just 12 when he played Bruce, which served as his first Hollywood role.

Two years later, he earned a spot in Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore’s The Wedding Singer and later Alfred Clark in the long-running medical drama, ER.

Despite his promising start as a child actor, Karz soon opted to step away from the limelight to focus on his studies.

The former actor graduated as a doctor in 2017 (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

In 2017, he graduated as a doctor from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, as per The Sun.

He previously said that he was drawn to osteopathic medicine – a patient-centred, holistic approach to healthcare – after completing work as a production associate for MTV News.

“I realised I wanted to do more service-oriented work. I was really into community gardening at the time, and I began volunteering to teach people from low-income communities how to grow their own food,” he said in a 2015 interview with the American Osteopathic Association’s publication, The Do.

From chocolate cake-eater to medical expert – not bad, right? (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

“Through gardening, I learned a little bit about biology and chemistry, enough to realize I wanted to delve more into science. I went back to school to study biochemistry, which led me to medicine.

The medical practitioner said that he was interested in osteopathic medicine’s ‘focus on helping the whole partent’.

He added that his time at MTV tought him that you have to be prepared for ‘anything to happen’, which ‘correlates a lot with medicine’.

“You can’t always expect things to go smoothly,” he claimed.