Crushed: Jonathan Taylor Thomas

[TMC]

He may only be 5'4", but he took up every square inch of our hearts.

[JO Sweet Heart]

I'll admit that I used to be so crazy about him.

God bless you and him always!!!

Holly

[TMC]

Jonathan Taylor Thomas Was a Heartthrob in the '90s, but Rachael Leigh Cook Explains Why She Wasn't Crushing on Him While Filming “Tom and Huck”

Rachael Leigh Cook says she did not have a crush on her Tom and Huck co-star Jonathan Taylor Thomas when filming the 1995 movie, despite the "mania" surrounding him at the time.

Cook, now 46, spoke about the film on the March 18 episode Danielle Fishel's podcast, Teen Beat.

The movie starred Cook, Thomas, now 44, and Brad Renfro, who died in 2008 at age 25.

Thomas was, at the time, a teen heartthrob, due to appearing on the sitcom Home Improvement and on countless magazine covers at the time.

Cook, however, had not seen the show.

"I'm so relieved I hadn't seen Home Improvement ... so luckily I didn't have the mania," she said.

There was also a small age gap between them, she noted, which at the time felt greater than it actually was.

"I was 15 and I think he was like 12-and-a-half," she recalled. "Which seems weird, when you're 15."

Either way, she said she felt much older at the time, adding that Thomas was "very funny" and "wildly smart."

Renfro, meanwhile, was also 12 but "somehow had the soul of a ... touring jazz musician," Cook said. "The age of the soul on that human."

Touching on his death from a heroin overdose, the actress said, "In some ways when people are like, 'Can you believe it?' I'm like, 'In some ways, yeah.' "

In their downtime while making the film, Cook acknowledged that she and Thomas "weren't as close" as he spent most of his time off set with his family.

"I would have welcomed a friendship with Jonathan," she said.

But she and Renfro, she said, "would go and hang out at like the Waffle House, kick around Huntsville, Alabama, which is crazy to me. It was a really awesome experience."

The adventure comedy-drama film was based on Mark Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and starred Thomas as Tom Sawyer, Renfro as Huck Finn and Cook as Becky Thatcher.

Thomas left Hollywood at the height of his career, going on to attend Harvard, Columbia and St. Andrew’s University in Scotland,

“I’d been going nonstop since I was 8 years old,” the actor told PEOPLE in a 2013 interview. “I wanted to go to school, to travel and have a bit of a break.”

Read the original article on People