Nineties icon Jonathan Taylor Thomas has reunited with his Home Improvement family years after stepping out of the limelight.
Patricia Richardson — who played Jill, the wife of Tim Allen’s character, Tim Taylor, on the ABC sitcom — shared a picture Wednesday on Instagram that showed her smiling with two of her onscreen sons, Thomas, 44, and Taran Noah Smith, 42, who played Randy and Mark Taylor, respectively.
Richardson, who has three real-life kids of her own, captioned the post: “My other boys.”
Both Thomas and Smith have stepped away from acting, while Zachery Ty Bryan, 44 — who played the fictional family’s third onscreen son, Brad Taylor — is currently serving a 16-month prison sentence in California after a 2024 DUI arrest.
It’s been years since Thomas, a former teen heartthrob, has been pictured publicly after he left his acting career behind.
Before his role on Home Improvement from 1991 to 1998, Thomas’s child stardom began with The Bradys. He also voiced Young Simba in 1994 hit The Lion King and starred in family films Tom and Huck and Man of the House.
Thomas — nicknamed JTT by fans — stepped away from Home Improvement early into its final season in order to focus on his education, and went on to enroll at Harvard University in 2000 to study philosophy and history.
Although he has made rare appearances in TV shows over the years, including several episodes of Last Man Standing from 2013 to 2015, Thomas has largely stayed away from the public eye and stayed quiet about his personal life. So after years without any update from Thomas, Richardson’s recent photo brought fans out of the woodworks to celebrate a rare look at the former star.
“I’ll never outgrow my JTT phase, I fear,” one person commented on the post. Another wrote, “And for those who keep hoping for a new ‘here he is!’ photo of Mr. Thomas … our internet just exploded.”
A third added: “This photo makes my heart so happy. You’re my favorite TV mom, and I’ll never grow out of my JTT love phase, or of my love for Home Improvement.”
“I actually screamed out loud,” another person wrote, with one commenter adding, “Gosh, please convince JTT to come back to us somehow! We need to see more of him!”
Although the reunion might have left fans clamoring for a Home Improvement reboot, Allen admitted earlier this year that it would be more than difficult considering the “personality problems” between Thomas and Smith — who are no longer actors — and Bryan, a convicted felon.