{"id":600567,"date":"2026-08-21T21:30:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/600567\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T21:30:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T21:30:23","slug":"what-jake-lacy-watches-and-reads-with-his-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/600567\/","title":{"rendered":"What Jake Lacy Watches (and Reads) With His Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Walt Disney Co., Universal Pictures, Marvel, Columbia Pictures, Warner Bros.), Brian Fluharty\/Getty Images, Courtesy of retailers, Twenty Trucks\n <\/p>\n

Jake Lacy has a couple of sporty kids. His two boys \u2014 who are 6 and 8 \u2014 spent their summer days hiking, swimming, and going to sailing camps and their nights watching (and talking) Boston Red Sox baseball.<\/p>\n

Lacy acknowledges that he\u2019s lucky to have even landed his sons in those camps, given the mad scramble parents experience every late winter or early spring to register their kids months ahead of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cFive months out, they\u2019re like, \u2018Do you want to sign up for the last week of August?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s always like, \u2018I don\u2019t know, I guess?\u2019 and then you end up with a patchwork quilt of events and come June you realize you put them in nature camp four weeks in a row even though they\u2019re going to be burned out on outdoor crafts by week two.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because Lacy is an actor, he\u2019s often away for months at a time filming shows like Hulu\u2019s new series Furious, in which he plays the abusive ex-boyfriend of Emmy Rossum\u2019s character, Alice. That means that trying to schedule months in advance, let alone weeks or even days, can feel particularly daunting to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of someone saying, \u2018Do you want to put money down for your kids for next summer?\u2019 is always like \u2026 I don\u2019t even know what continent I\u2019m going to be on,\u201d he says. \u201cThe last couple of jobs where I was gone for a long time, I was just out on my own and that sucked for everyone including my kids but especially my wife, who then just becomes a single parent kind of at the drop of a hat.\u201d<\/p>\n

If all goes to plan, Lacy hopes to be able to take his family on a trip somewhere together before the end of summer. But in the meantime, here\u2019s what Lacy and his family are listening to, watching, and playing together at home.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Brian Fluharty\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

Both my boys are deep into baseball. We\u2019re like a real Red Sox family, even though when they were little my wife was like, \u201cLet them decide.\u201d We lived in New York at the time but I was like, \u201cNo, we can\u2019t do that.\u201d It\u2019s just a nonnegotiable. Like, if they want to pick other teams, if they want to be Knicks fans, Rangers fans, go to town. But you can\u2019t grow up a Sox fan and then be like, \u2018And my kids are Yankees fans.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

We just watched the All Star game the other night and the Home Run Derby the night before that, and we\u2019ll record a game at night so they can put it on in the morning. They\u2019re always amped to give me the blow-by-blow from that game, too.<\/p>\n

My kids like fart jokes and poop jokes and butt jokes, and we\u2019ll give over to some of that, but then at some point it\u2019s always like, \u201cThat\u2019s enough. There\u2019s got to be some other funny thing in this world than just the fact that Andy has a butt.\u201d There\u2019s never any setup, either. There\u2019s not even a punch line, really.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some song that goes, \u201cTake it easy, do it right,\u201d and my 6-year-old for whatever reason thought it was so funny to say \u201ctake it easy\u201d all calm and then scream \u201cDO IT RIGHT!\u201d So it would be calm, then screaming, calm, then screaming, and that went on for like 25 minutes. It was a little like a Tim & Eric bit where, like, the first two times it\u2019s funny, the third time it\u2019s really funny, but then it\u2019s less funny. Then the seventh time it\u2019s actually funnier, and then it\u2019s awful again, but the 19th time it hits even harder. So he\u2019s got that all figured out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They\u2019re super into Dog Man, Captain Underpants, and Goosebumps. They like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, too. Those are the books that they want to read on their own.<\/p>\n

As a family, we\u2019ll read Junie B. Jones, which is a great series, and Geronimo Stilton and the Magic Treehouse books. With my older son, we\u2019ll read the Harry Potter books in a way where we trade off reading pages to one another. We do that with the Benedict Society books, too.<\/p>\n

Before bed, we\u2019ll read some Shel Silverstein poems and stuff like that, or find more picture books that they like. There\u2019s one called Our Fort<\/a> that\u2019s great for bedtime because they have space in them, both visually and narratively. There\u2019s more room for my kids to project themselves into the book or even lay back into it a little bit.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Walt Disney Co.\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n

We saw Hoppers, which was lovely. At one point, though, Jon Hamm does the voice of the mayor but there\u2019s a robot who pretends to be him and is essentially wearing a mayor-skin suit. His face gets ripped off and the robot has this maniacal skin-suit-face-peeled-off look going on, and it\u2019s a G-rated movie so I remember thinking, Damn, that\u2019s pretty scary.<\/p>\n

So later, when my son was describing the movie to my wife he was like \u201cThere\u2019s a scary part where this thing happens.\u201d They won\u2019t have nightmares about it but they can identify that something is scary, that they didn\u2019t like it, and then move on from it.<\/p>\n

\"GHOSTBUSTERS, <\/p>\n

Photo: Columbia Pictures\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n

I was born in \u201986, so I\u2019m trying to offer them movies that I really liked when I was younger, but also they want to have their own childhood. They don\u2019t need to relive mine. So we watched the newest Superman movie and we\u2019ll see any SpongeBob movie that comes out. We just went and saw the new Minions movie. There\u2019s a lovely theater in Bedford, New York, and we\u2019ll drive over there. It\u2019s small and really well run and has little screens. It feels kind of quaint and small.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re still young for these, but I\u2019m excited to be able to show them Ghostbusters, Field of Dreams, Beetlejuice, and E.T. When I was a little kid, like 4, I got dropped off at day care because both my parents were working. I would be so distraught when my mom dropped me off that they would put E.T. on to calm me down every morning, so I\u2019ve watched E.T. probably hundreds and hundreds of times.<\/p>\n

Now, having young kids, I don\u2019t think that was the right call. I\u2019m not sure my mom would have been pumped to know, like, \u201cHe\u2019s watching E.T. again.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We got them these little knockoff Game Boys, if \u2014 I don\u2019t know \u2014 Game Boy was running on DOS or something. They\u2019re just like, \u201cGet the egg into this thing.\u201d We don\u2019t really do screens with them otherwise. They keep telling me that they want a Nintendo Switch and I\u2019ll say, \u201cYeah, maybe.\u201d I\u2019m just trying to push it off as far as I can.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019ll do board games like Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, Monopoly Junior, Clue Junior, or puzzles. When I was a kid, my parents did the same kind of games with me, though, and I was like, \u201cThis is a prison.\u201d Now I\u2019m doing the same thing and I\u2019m sure my kids wish they were playing anything else.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Marvel\/Columbia Pictures\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n

My younger son in particular was super into Spider-Man, even though he\u2019d never seen a single Spider-Man movie or read the comic. Then he got really into Minecraft, even though he\u2019s never played Minecraft. We even went and saw the movie, which was awesome but also confusing.<\/p>\n

If you go see a sequel to a movie you\u2019ve seen and they\u2019ve designed it so that anyone can jump onboard, you\u2019re like, \u201cThat\u2019s a little hacky.\u201d But being on the other side of that is like, \u201cThank God they explained it, because I don\u2019t know what any of this is or how we got into this world.\u201d<\/p>\n

We do a lot of playing outside with them, like playing baseball in the backyard or driveway hockey and driveway basketball. Tennis, swimming \u2026 we\u2019re just trying to stay active with them. My hope is that my knees hold up long enough that when my kids are 11 and 12, I can be like, \u201cLet\u2019s go trail run together. Let\u2019s get after it,\u201d or \u201cLet\u2019s do the Pacific Coast Trail. Let\u2019s go do the Long Trail<\/a>. Let\u2019s do it together before you really don\u2019t want anything to do with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Photo: Twenty Trucks\n <\/p>\n

When my kids were little, we did Twenty Trucks<\/a>. It\u2019s on YouTube and this guy initially set out to write 20 songs about different trucks, but there\u2019s got to be 100 of them at this point. He low-key crushes these songs, too, like the production quality\u2019s really high.<\/p>\n

When the boys were really little, like 2 and 4, they\u2019d go nuts for Twenty Trucks but now in the car it\u2019s a mix. We play a lot of Tom Petty, Dawes, Led Zeppelin, the Dead, and Neil Young. I also feel good because when my kids are wearing those kid Beastie Boys shirts, I\u2019m like, \u201cNo, they actually listen to the Beastie Boys. Like, they request \u2018Sabotage\u2019 when we drive to the store.\u201d<\/p>\n

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