Young stars in Hollywood seem to have it all. Fame, money, and good looks; people often seem to idealize their lives.

But he was struggling internally whether Hollywood was where he needed to be. And then he had something call to him; his faith.

When he was growing up, his family was not religious. The actor said, “When I was growing up, we didn’t go to church.”

“If you had asked me, I would have said I would be in the category of an atheist at 16 years old, 17 years old,” he surprisingly revealed later.

“I think I caught my atheism—it was by contagion,” he shared, he was referring to his teachers who taught him science and other subjects and regarded religion as “just a fairy tale.”

A chance encounter made the young boy reconsider his relationship with faith.

He met a girl he liked, and she asked him to attend church with her and her family. “I’ll be honest. It wasn’t because I was interested in God. I was interested in the girl,” he later admitted in a conversation.

However the visit to the church changed his life and the impact of it was even visible to his friends in Hollywood.

The 17-year-old’s real-life experience with his faith began to influence how he approached his role in “Growing Pains.” The show runners and his co-stars did not let this change go unnoticed.

The producers worried that the young boy’s new found devotion to his faith would affect how he would approach the show and in turn affect the show and its longevity itself.

“Is he getting into something that’s really gonna take him into Looney Town? And if it is, we need to stop that,” he recalled what the concerns surrounding him at the time had been..

“I was trying to take the moral high road. I wanted to please God genuinely, and I think sometimes that got misunderstood,” he says now. His priorities however had taken a major shift and people around him were concerned.