‘Family Ties’ child star Brian Bonsall details disturbing letters and pictures from inmate

Brian Bonsall says his Family Ties costars really were like family, but it was a different story with some fans.

“When I was a little older, my mom started telling me about one dude specifically who was sending me, I don’t know how, but sending me weird pictures,” Bonsall revealed on the “Child Stars Gone Violent” installment of Investigation Discovery’s new docuseries, Hollywood Demons, which premieres on Monday. These pictures weren’t sent after he’d left the sitcom, which he first appeared on at only four years old. Bonsall says the correspondence started “when I was on Family Ties.”

Bonall’s mother Kathleen, who held the letter back from her son until he reached adulthood, recalled, “I just remember them being a little off. Nothing sexual in there, but it was just very, ‘I think you’re the greatest actor,’ blah blah blah, and it was some 30-year-old guy.” Kathleen also shared that “the guy was writing to him from prison.”

Bonsall was cast on the NBC sitcom in its fifth season, when he was four years old. He played Andy, the precocious youngest child of the Keaton family who develops an especially close bond with Alex, the eldest Keaton played by breakout star Michael J. Fox.

Fox, who was 24 when the series fifth season hit the air, was able to parlay the massive spotlight the show turned on him into roles in generation-defining projects like Back to the Future and Teen Wolf. Bonsall’s nascent career also flourished beyond Family Ties, but fame had a different, more deleterious effect on the child star.

“Family Ties pushed me into the limelight to the point that I couldn’t walk down the street,” he shared. “I remember one person saying, ‘There’s Andy!’ Then, them and their friends realizing it, and other bystanders realizing it, and then forming a circle around me. Getting surrounded by screaming people, I didn’t understand it. I was on the brink of crying, and [it] scares you too, especially when you’re four.”

Kathleen shared a similar memory of the public insecurity brought about by young fame: “It was a few months after the first show started airing, some older lady rushing up and saying, ‘Andy! Andy! Andy!’ and trying to hug him. I mean she was just a little old lady, but it was still like, ‘You’re touching my child and you think you know him.”

Bonsall would go on to star in films like the Patrick Swayze comedy Father Hood and enduringly popular Disney original Blank Check, before moving with his family to Colorado. Bonsall credits his early experience with fame for sending him down a dark path that led to substance abuse and several arrests.

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The former actor shared that, with the help of wife Courtney Tuck, he has gotten sober and fathered a child of his own. He currently plays music with the band Sunset Silhouette.

“Child Stars Gone Violent,” the second episode of Investigation Discovery’s new series Hollywood Demons, premieres Monday, March 31 from 9-11 p.m. ET on ID and streams on Max.