Lance Oppenheim put the boy from Jerry Maguire and Stuart Little inside the To Catch a Predator sting house on purpose, and the reasons say as much about the show’s audience as about its host.

Most of what has been said about Primetime settles on one face: Robert Pattinson’s, playing Chris Hansen at the height of To Catch a Predator, while the real Hansen insists the whole thing is fiction. The casting choice that says most about Lance Oppenheim’s film sits further down the call sheet. Jonathan Lipnicki, the boy who told Tom Cruise that the human head weighs eight pounds in Jerry Maguire, plays one of the men the show was built to catch.

It would be easy to file that under shock casting, and Oppenheim knew it. The choice reads more like an argument about how the show worked. A film about a television franchise that ran on public exposure borrows the one thing a screenplay cannot write from scratch, an actor’s history on screen, and leaves the audience’s own memory to do the rest.

What Primetime is, and where Lipnicki fits

Primetime, released by A24, dramatizes the stretch of the mid-2000s when Hansen’s To Catch a Predator segments on NBC’s Dateline were among the most talked-about hours on American television. The format, launched in 2004, paired the network with the civilian watchdog group Perverted Justice, whose adult decoys posed as minors in chatrooms. Once the conversations turned sexual, the men were invited to a house, where Hansen walked in holding printouts of their messages and delivered his catchphrase, “Have a seat.” Police were often waiting outside. NBC stopped airing the segments in 2007.

The screenplay is the first by Ajon Singh, adapted loosely from Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” a piece about a 2006 sting in Texas that ended with the death of the man it targeted. The film folds its events into a single year, 2006. Pattinson plays Hansen and also produces, alongside Lars Knudsen and Ari Aster. Merritt Wever plays his producer, Andie Bender. Skyler Gisondo plays Dan, a young decoy hired to pass for a teenager, and Phoebe Bridgers plays Del, another decoy. Matthew Maher is Xavier Von Erck of Perverted Justice, and Alex Winter, Anna Faris and Bokeem Woodbine round out a crowded ensemble.

Lipnicki’s part is small and pointed. He plays a man known only by his screen name, Crazyfrog73, who comes to the sting house hoping to meet the boy Gisondo’s decoy is pretending to be, and is caught in the kitchen on Dan’s first day on the job. The scene, described widely since the film’s Venice premiere and discussed openly by Lipnicki himself, involves full-frontal nudity and a can of whipped cream.

Why Oppenheim wanted the boy from Jerry Maguire

Oppenheim has been explicit about the logic. At the Venice press conference he said casting Lipnicki and Gisondo was a deliberate decision rooted in their pasts as child actors, a way “to take the baggage that they brought to movies before and figure out new ways for them to shed the skin of who they were in different films.” The director and the actor are close in age, and Oppenheim grew up watching Lipnicki on the big screen. “One of my all time favorite films, Jerry Maguire, was a reference for us while making Primetime,” he has said. After screening Cameron Crowe’s film for his crew during pre-production, he kept wondering where its child star was now.

The answer had been sitting in his phone. Lipnicki says Oppenheim had seen an interview with him years earlier and saved his name in his iPhone notes, on a list of people he wanted to work with. Casting asked for a self-tape because there was no recent footage of him. He was offered the part and still hesitated, until the director called after a day on set: “I know how this seems. I don’t want it to seem stunt-casty. I want you involved in the creative process, and I want you to know where this came from.” The two traded notes on how the character should look and behave, down to the bleached hair Lipnicki now calls a time capsule of the era.

What gives the casting its charge is the actor’s own path, which runs in the opposite direction to the man at the center of the film. Lipnicki made his debut at six, opposite Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, and moved straight on to Stuart Little. He remembers junkets for that film where journalists asked a child whether he was going to do drugs, and a youth spent under “a lot of pressure not to become a train wreck.” He counts himself lucky, with good parents, public school and a childhood “as normal as it could be with this extra thing attached to it.”

As an adult he left Los Angeles, got rid of everything he owned and drove around the country in his Jeep Wrangler, his “Eat, Pray, Love moment,” before settling in Oklahoma, where he teaches acting, produces and runs a handful of other ventures. He describes Primetime as part of a decision to stop worrying about other people’s opinions: “I have no control over what people are going to think, and I’m not going to concern myself with that anymore.” On the role itself he is blunt. “As actors, we pray for dark material,” he says, and if something scares you, “most likely you should do it.”

A host who lives on the audience, an actor who walked away from it

Set that beside the Hansen the film builds. Much of the discussion since Venice has been about how Primetime portrays its host: as a man who measures himself by the size of his audience and the prizes he has not won. The engine of that character is the opinion of others. Lipnicki’s stated freedom is the refusal of it. The actor who walked away from the public gaze is placed inside the house built to feed it, and the casting nudges the question from one host’s vanity toward the people at home who made the show a hit.

Lipnicki himself declines to over-read it. Asked whether putting former child stars in a To Catch a Predator film says something about how Hollywood treats children, he answers that there are “a lot of ways to look at it,” and calls the film “a commentary on certain elements of that world.” He saw the original show back in the day and went back to it before shooting. “If you had told 14-year-old me that I’d be in a movie about this, I would have said, ‘No way.’”

Oppenheim comes to fiction from nonfiction. His documentaries Some Kind of Heaven, set in the Florida retirement community The Villages, and Ren Faire, about a Texas renaissance festival, were built on real people whose public selves arrived ready-made. Primetime is his first narrative feature, shot in New Orleans in early 2025 with David Bolen as cinematographer and a score by his regular collaborator Ari Balouzian. He uses an actor’s real biography the way a documentary uses a subject: as material that arrives already charged. His next documentary, You Can See Everything, is due this fall as well.

Where the fiction leaves the record

The same method is where Primetime is most exposed. The whipped-cream moment, its most discussed image, has no counterpart in the real broadcasts; some men caught on To Catch a Predator did arrive at the sting houses naked, but nothing like that scene ever aired. The film’s inventions have drawn objections that it bends the record of a real show built around real cases. Hansen saw it in a crowded theater in Times Square and told viewers to go in knowing it is “absolutely a fictional portrayal of me, of my colleagues, of the series.” Asked by Jesse Watters to grade Pattinson’s performance, he gave it a D. If Oppenheim’s argument lives in the invention, so does the case against him.

Primetime premiered in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 5 and opened in US theaters on September 25, two days after reaching France and Germany. It runs 110 minutes and is rated R. Lipnicki, 35, has more on the way: Williston, a film with Matt Walsh and Geneva Carr that he executive produced and that writer-director Adam Seidel adapted from a stage play, premieres in November. He also has a small role in Butcher’s War with Aaron Eckhart and is acting in and producing a romantic comedy, Mazel Tough.

He is still best known for a line about how much a human head weighs. Primetime stakes its most uncomfortable scene on that memory: the audience walks into Hansen’s kitchen expecting the kid, and finds the show’s real product waiting there instead.