Prince Jackson was 13 years old when Oprah Winfrey asked him about the future.
He’s Michael Jackson’s oldest child. His given name is Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., but the world has always known him as Prince. Sixteen years ago tomorrow, on Monday, Nov 8, 2010, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” aired a sit-down with Michael’s children and his parents. It was taped in the backyard of the Jackson family home, with several cousins around. Prince was 13, his sister Paris was 12 and his little brother Blanket, who now goes by Bigi, was 8.
Prince told Oprah his favorite pastimes were “video games and sports,” which is about as normal as a 13-year-old answer gets. Then came the question every kid hears sooner or later. What do you want to do when you grow up?
He wanted to “produce movies and direct.”
This fan upload is from his part of that 2010 interview, so you can see the boy he was back then.
Young Prince Jackson talking with Oprah in 2010
Lots of kids say they want to make movies. Most of them grow up and do something else.
Prince didn’t let it go. Years before any film came along, he started his own production company, and the name he picked says a lot about how he sees being Michael’s son. He called it King’s Son Productions.
When he went on “Good Morning America” in 2017, he explained the motto behind it. “My father was the King of Pop and King’s Son Productions has this mantra where a title is earned, but a name is given.”
In other words, he knew he’d been handed a famous name. Anything more, he’d have to work for.
Here he is a few years later on British TV, talking about what it was really like to grow up with Michael Jackson as his dad.
Prince Jackson on growing up as Michael’s son
Then, this year, the boy who told Oprah he wanted to make movies helped make one about his own father.
“Michael,” directed by Antoine Fuqua, opened in theaters on Friday, Apr 24, 2026. It follows Michael from the Jackson 5 in the 1960s to the “Bad” tour in the late 1980s. Prince, now 29, was an executive producer on the film. And the actor playing Michael is family, too: Jaafar Jackson, the son of Michael’s brother Jermaine, Prince’s cousin.
The two of them go way back. They spent time together as kids at Hayvenhurst, the California home of their grandfather Joe Jackson. And that’s where the whole thing really started, with two boys making home movies.
Prince told ABC News Live Prime this spring that the film was “One of the greatest experiences of my life.” He thought back to “growing up with Jaafar as we did at Hayvenhurst as siblings, as cousins, making home movies to now here we are making a major motion picture about my father, his uncle.”
Michael, he said, was “someone we both love very much.”
You can hear Prince talk about what he took away from watching the film in this ABC News clip.
Prince Jackson tells ABC News what the film meant to him
Entertainment Tonight also caught Prince’s reaction to seeing his cousin take on the role of his dad, which is worth a look for the family side of the story.
Prince Jackson reacts to his cousin playing Michael
Sixteen years ago, a 13-year-old sat in his family’s backyard and told Oprah what he wanted to do. This year he got to do it, alongside the cousin he used to make home movies with, telling the story of the man they both loved.