The child actor from Role Models was sentenced to 30 months over a stolen gun found at 104 mph
The gun was stolen, the car was doing 104 in a 70 zone, and the man in it had three convictions that already barred him from touching a firearm. That is how a child actor from Fred Claus and Role Models ended up with a federal sentence in Iowa.
A federal judge in Iowa sent Bobb'e J. Thompson to prison for thirty months on Wednesday. He is 30 years old, and he has been on screen since he was six.
The charge was possession of a firearm by a felon. Judge Leonard T. Strand also imposed three years of supervised release to follow. The Justice Department's own account of how he got there is the part worth reading, because it is more specific than the coverage.
On 22 September 2025 a patrol car in Cerro Gordo County clocked his vehicle at 104 miles per hour in a 70 zone. When officers approached, they saw Thompson and a passenger swapping seats. They smelled marijuana. In his backpack they found several bags of it and a loaded .40 calibre handgun that had been reported stolen in Kansas City, Missouri.
He could not legally hold a firearm at all. Three prior convictions had already settled that.
The record the sentence was built on
Federal gun sentences turn on what came before, and in this case the prior record is what moved the number. Two 2020 convictions for violence, one for battery causing serious bodily injury and one for assault with force, and a 2022 conviction for prohibited possession of a firearm — the same offence he has now been sentenced for a second time.
- 2020 — battery with serious bodily injury
- 2020 — assault with force
- 2022 — prohibited possession of a firearm
- 22 September 2025 — the traffic stop that produced the stolen .40
- 16 September 2026 — thirty months, plus three years supervised
The case was brought in the Northern District of Iowa, not in Los Angeles, and it moved through the system in under twelve months.
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What the name on the docket used to mean
Thompson was one of the most-used child actors of the late 2000s. He played Vince Vaughn's foster-kid foil in Fred Claus in 2007, the foul-mouthed nine-year-old in Role Models in 2008, and a lead child role in Land of the Lost a year later. He worked steadily on television through his teens and later on MTV's Wild 'N Out.
His last widely seen film credit is School Dance in 2014, when he was eighteen. The gap between that and the docket entry is twelve years long, and almost none of it is on IMDb.
The sentencing happened on Wednesday. It reached the entertainment press on Thursday night, roughly thirty hours later.
That delay is its own small fact about how far outside the industry this case sat. A federal press release went out from Iowa, local stations in Sioux City picked it up first, and the trade and celebrity outlets arrived a day behind them.
Child actors who stop working are usually described as having disappeared, which is inaccurate. What happens is that the work stops and the person keeps going, without the structure the work provided — a schedule, a set, a payroll, a studio teacher. Thompson was a professional from the age of six to roughly eighteen, and then he was a private citizen in his twenties with a public name attached to him.
None of that is a defence of driving at 104 with a stolen pistol in the back. It is the reason this particular docket entry gets written about at all, while the other federal gun cases heard in Iowa that week do not.
Thompson has not issued a statement, and no representative has commented. Under federal rules there is no parole; he will serve the great majority of the thirty months, and then three years of supervision after that.
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