More than 25 years after the hit ABC sitcom Home Improvement came to an end, one of the show’s stars has resurfaced looking like a totally different person.
An appearance that Taran Noah Smith, now 41, made on the podcast The Best Show with Tom Scharpling earlier this year is making the rounds online again, and the former child star, who played Tim Allen‘s character’s youngest son, Mark Taylor, on the series looks unrecognizable with long hair and a beard.
As The Sun pointed out, the interview, which originally premiered in February 2025, is the first time that Smith has appeared publicly since 2011, making this podcast stop a big deal for fans of the show who were wondering what he’s up to these days.
While on the podcast, Smith looked back on his time on Home Improvement — including his character’s unexpected teenage goth phase. Clarifying that it wasn’t his idea, he said that the writers had to do something now that he, as the youngest son, was looming over Zachary Ty Bryan and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, the actors who played his older brothers.
“The whole storyline of the older brothers beating up on me or teasing me didn’t really work anymore because now I was taller than both of them.” he said.
He added, “I found out later the head writer on the show, he had a son that was right around my age, and after about halfway through the season, I’m in wardrobe, black fingernails, and dog collar and all the stuff on, and I went backstage and came face to face with his son, who was not in wardrobe, but looked just like me, and we had this very awkward moment of like, ‘Oh, I’m your dad’s way of kind of dealing with you, sorry.'”
Taran Noah Smith’s Life After Home Improvement
There’s a reason we haven’t seen much of Smith since his Home Improvement days — he actually decided to leave his acting career behind a long time ago.
“I started Home Improvement when I was seven, and the show ended when I was 16. I never had the chance to decide what I wanted to do with my life,” he said in an interview in 2001, via The Mirror. “When I was 16, I knew that I didn’t want to act anymore.”
The last role that Smith is credited for is providing the voice of Patrick in the Batman Beyond animated TV series in 1999, and since then, he’s been doing his own thing, and it sounds like that’s just the way he likes it.
While he’s a much more private person these days, according to Smith’s LinkedIn page, he now works at SpaceX as a sea recovery technician, six years after SF Gate reported that his own submersible was spotted in Monterey Bay as he was working as a submarine instructor.
This story was originally reported by Parade on Nov 18, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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