Former child star played middle child Randy Taylor on the Tim Allen sitcom
Former child star played middle child Randy Taylor on the Tim Allen sitcom
Published Jul 31, 2026 • Last updated 17 hours ago • 2 minute read
'Home Improvement' stars Taran Noah Smith, Patricia Richardson and Jonathan Taylor Thomas in new photo. Photo by Patricia Richardson /InstagramSee more Toronto Sun on Google — save as a Preferred Source
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Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who played one of Tim Allen’s sons on Home Improvement, had a mini-reunion with several of his castmates this week.
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In a snap shared by actress Patricia Richardson to Instagram, a bespectacled Thomas, 44, appeared alongside his TV mom and Taran Noah Smith, who played his younger brother on the Emmy-winning comedy.
“My other boys❤️” Richardson, 75, captioned the post.
Missing from the reunion photo was Zachery Ty Bryan, who was sentenced earlier this year to 16 months in prison following a DUI conviction.
Thomas has kept a low profile since the series ended in 1999. He famously played Allen’s middle son Randy Taylor on the ABC sitcom for seven seasons, between 1991 and 1998, before leaving to pursue his schooling. Thomas returned for a handful of episodes during the series’ eighth and final season.
According to USA Today, Thomas entered Harvard University in 2000, majoring in philosophy and history. He also spent a year abroad studying at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and attended Columbia University.
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Thomas told PEOPLE in 2013 that he left the limelight because he wanted more of a normal life.
“I’d been going nonstop since I was 8 years old,” he said. “I wanted to go to school, to travel and have a bit of a break.”
Thomas said he relished his time as a student.
“To sit in a big library amongst books and students, that was pretty cool,” he said at the time. “It was a novel experience for me.”
He also said he didn’t regret walking away from fame.
“I never took the fame too seriously,” he said. “It was a great period in my life, but it doesn’t define me. When I think back on the time, I look at it with a wink. I focus on the good moments I had, not that I was on a lot of magazine covers.”
‘He wants to direct and write’Thomas reunited with Allen on Last Man Standing in the 2010s. Richardson also appeared as a guest star.
In a 2024 appearance on the Back to the Best podcast, Richardson said she still kept in touch with Thomas, but explained that “he’s not really interested in acting. He wants to direct and write.”
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Richardson also shot down speculation that Home Improvement could be revived like other ’90s sitcoms.
“It’s not the same – it’s not gonna be the show. At all,” Richardson said of the series at the time. “And people think we can just magically go right back to who we were 30 years ago and do a show that was 30 years ago, and we’ve all changed quite a bit, I think, since then. And the show would just be … It would be very weird. It makes me sad to think about it. I think — We did it. We did it well. We quit at the right time before it got really bad. And it should just stay as it is.”
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