Full name: Thomas Alexander Dekker
Nickname: Tom
Date of birth: December 28, 1987
Hometown: Las Vegas, Nevada
Twitter: @theThomasDekker
Bet you didn't know... Thomas started writing and producing his own "electrofolk" music when he was 16. He released his first album, Psyanotic, in 2008, and he’s currently working on a second called Protean.
6 Things You Need to Know About Thomas Dekker
Born
into a family of entertainers — his mother is a concert pianist, acting
coach, actress, and singer; and his father was an artist, set designer,
opera singer, and actor (he passed away in 2010) — Thomas Dekker got an
early start in acting. At age 6, the dark-haired cutie became a soap
star, making his debut in The Young and the Restless. He got his big break in 1997, when he became a regular in the Disney Channel series Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show. In 2006, after hopping from one small-screen project to the next, he landed one of his biggest roles to date: Zach in Heroes.
But he ended up leaving the hit series after only 12 episodes,
primarily due to a mini-kerfuffle over a plan for his formerly straight character to come out; Thomas wasn’t opposed, just annoyed that the writers
were poised to change Zach in a fundamental, seemingly sudden way.
Before landing his starring role in The Secret Circle, Thomas played John Connor in Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles; gay icon Lance Loud in HBO’s Cinema Verite; a bisexual college kid in Gregg Araki’s Kaboom; and a young father in the film Angel’s Crest. He’s also set to begin directing a movie he wrote based on the lives of teenage hustlers and prostitutes in Los Angeles.
It
should come as no surprise that his range of roles has sparked interest
in his sexuality, which Thomas addressed in an April 2011 interview with Out magazine.
He said, "I’ve only really had relationships with women, but I’m
certainly not closed to it. If there are possibilities of being able to
do anything in life, why would you say you would never take any up? In
the later chunk of my teen years I was so all over the place with sex.
It was terrible. I never really had a real relationship at all. During
puberty, it’s all about sex, and it’s all about figuring yourself out. I
think I overdid it when I was younger."
Although
Thomas has avoided the child star curse (here’s lookin’ at you, LiLo),
he hasn’t led a fully squeaky-clean life. On October 15, 2009, he hit a
17-year old cyclist training for a race on a freeway on-ramp. Almost
charged with two counts of felony DUI, he ended up getting off easy —
with a $300 fine, two years of informal probation, and a 12-hour alcohol
education class — when it came out that the cyclist was at fault.
