Jonathan Brandis (1976–2003) was an American actor — young Bill Denbrough in Stephen King’s It, and Lucas Wolenczak on seaQuest DSV.
For viewers who were children in 1990, Jonathan Brandis is not a trivia answer; he is the face of the thing itself. The Losers’ Club has seven members, but Stephen King’s It is Bill Denbrough’s story — the stuttering boy who loses his little brother to a drain in Derry and talks six other frightened kids into going down into the dark after the thing that took him. Brandis played that boy at 14, in the most-watched Stephen King adaptation of its era, and then did the thing child actors are not supposed to be able to do: he carried a network science-fiction series for three full seasons as a young adult. His life was short. This page keeps to the work, and to the record.
Quick Specs
Born: April 13, 1976, Danbury, Connecticut (full name Jonathan Gregory Brandis)
Died: November 12, 2003, Los Angeles, California, aged 27
Known for: young Bill Denbrough in Stephen King’s It (1990); Lucas Wolenczak on seaQuest DSV (1993–1996); Bastian in The NeverEnding Story II (1990)
Awards: Young Artist Award winner, 1994 (seaQuest DSV)
Child Actor
Brandis was an only child, born in Danbury, Connecticut, to Mary Brandis, a teacher who also served as his personal manager, and Greg Brandis, a food distributor and firefighter. He was a child model at two (Buster Brown shoes) and acting in television commercials by four. His acting debut came at six, as Kevin Buchanan on the ABC soap One Life to Live (1982–83). The family moved to Los Angeles when he was nine, and through the 1980s he stacked the era’s guest spots — Kate & Allie, Sledge Hammer! (as the young Sledge), L.A. Law, Webster, Full House, Who’s the Boss?, Murder, She Wrote, The Wonder Years — and TV movies, including Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story (1987), playing Lance Reventlow at eleven. His first film appearance was a small one, a party guest in Fatal Attraction (1987). He graduated from the San Fernando Valley Professional School in 1993, by which time the guest spots had become a career.
The Breakthrough Run
It came in a rush, three years that stacked a fantasy sequel, a Stephen King miniseries, a Rodney Dangerfield comedy and a Chuck Norris vehicle on one young résumé. First, straight horror: Stepfather II (1989), as Todd Grayland. Then the starring role — Bastian Balthazar Bux in The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter, cast at 13. Precision matters here: Brandis did not originate Bastian. Barret Oliver played him in the 1984 film; the sequel recast the child roles after auditioning more than 600 children because the original cast had aged out, and Jason James Richter would play Bastian in the third film. Brandis is the middle Bastian, and the film is a 1990 film — German release October 25, 1990; the American release followed in February 1991. In Ladybugs (1992) he played Matthew, who poses as “Martha” to play on the girls’ soccer team coached by Dangerfield’s Chester Lee, and in Sidekicks (1992) he was Barry Gabrewski, an asthmatic teenager who daydreams himself into adventures beside his hero, Chuck Norris, playing himself.
It (1990) — Young Bill Denbrough
The split, stated exactly: the miniseries runs on two tracks, the children in 1960 and the adults in 1990 — not the novel’s dates and not the later films’. Brandis plays Bill Denbrough as a boy. Richard Thomas plays the same man grown. Brandis has no connection to the 2017 and 2019 films, where Bill belongs to Jaeden Martell and James McAvoy.
Bill is the Losers’ founder and leader, the older brother whose guilt over Georgie — Pennywise‘s first on-screen victim — drives the children’s whole campaign against It. Brandis was 14 during the Vancouver shoot, one of two young Losers cast out of Los Angeles (Seth Green, the young Richie, was the other); the rest of the child cast was found in Vancouver. He described young Bill as the hardest role he had ever done, especially performing the stutter — his own characterization of the work, and the performance bears it out: the miniseries was singled out in contemporary and retrospective coverage for Curry’s Pennywise, but its emotional counterweight is Brandis’s Bill, the child the story is actually about. The production, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace from a teleplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Wallace, aired November 18 and 20, 1990, drew some 30 million viewers, and was ABC’s biggest success of the year; it won an Emmy for Richard Bellis’s score and an Eddie Award for its editing. His place in the It franchise begins the whole structure: no young Bill, no adult one.
seaQuest DSV and the Teen-Idol Years
At 17 he took the role that made him a teen idol — the word is the obituaries’ own — as Lucas Wolenczak, the teenage computer prodigy living aboard the UEO submarine seaQuest, in Steven Spielberg’s Amblin production for NBC, created by Rockne S. O’Bannon and starring Roy Scheider, then Michael Ironside. The run discipline: the series aired as seaQuest DSV for its first two seasons and was retitled seaQuest 2032 for the third; it ran from September 12, 1993 to June 9, 1996, and Brandis appeared in all 57 episodes — one of only three cast members, with Don Franklin and Ted Raimi, to remain from the first episode to the last. He was 17 when it premiered and 20 when it ended, and at its peak he appeared regularly in the teen magazines. Alongside it he voiced Mozenrath, the young sorcerer villain of Disney’s animated Aladdin series (1994–95), and made the era’s TV movies: Good King Wenceslas (1994), Born Free: A New Adventure (1996), Fall into Darkness (1996), Her Last Chance (1996), Two Came Back (1997).
His awards record, printed exactly: he won one Young Artist Award — Best Youth Actor Leading Role in a Television Series, for seaQuest DSV, at the 15th Youth in Film Awards in 1994 — alongside five further Young Artist nominations (for The Flash, The NeverEnding Story II, twice for Ladybugs, and Good King Wenceslas) and a Saturn Award nomination for The NeverEnding Story II. Listicles crediting him with two Young Artist Awards are inflating the nominations; the record is one win, and it was for the series that defined him.
The Adult Career
After seaQuest ended in 1996 he worked steadily in smaller parts — supporting roles, television movies and independent films; the record is a working actor’s slate, not a disappearance. He played “Mousy” in the Farrelly brothers’ Outside Providence (1999) and Cave Wyatt in Ang Lee’s Civil War film Ride with the Devil (1999); Pvt. Lewis P. Wakely, a small role, in Hart’s War (2002); and Casey Pedersen in the independent The Year That Trembled (2002), which some contemporary coverage treated as his most recent substantial work. His final television work was the unsold 2003 pilot 111 Gramercy Park. Behind the camera, he directed and produced the short film The Slainesville Boys, completed shortly before his death and released posthumously in 2004.
His last films carry two true answers, so this page prints both: Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (2004) was the last film he shot and his final onscreen appearance — Agent Neil Weatherford, opposite Harvey Keitel and Scott Glenn — while Bad Girls from Valley High, shot in 2000, was not released until 2005, the later of the two posthumous releases.
Death
Jonathan Brandis died on November 12, 2003, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 27; the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office ruled his death a suicide.
Legacy
The family’s on-record voice is his father’s. Speaking to People in 2021, Greg Brandis said: “His death wasn’t due to the entertainment industry. I look back now, and in his 20s, he showed signs of manic depression. I hope that anyone suffering can go get help.” That is Greg Brandis’s account, printed whole and attributed, and it stands against every tidier story told since; the child-actor advocate Paul Petersen said at the time that speculation about the cause “serves no purpose,” and this page follows both men. What returned Brandis to wide view was the work and the era’s friendships: he appears as himself in Kid 90 (2021), Soleil Moon Frye’s documentary built from her 1990s home-video archive — he was Frye’s friend, and the film gave audiences his teenage image back eighteen years on. For this site’s purposes the legacy is simpler and entirely his: the boy who carried the 1960 half of the most-watched Stephen King adaptation of its time, then anchored a Spielberg-produced network series for three full seasons — all before he turned 21.