What Happened to Jeff Cohen? From Chunk to Hollywood Power Lawyer

By CelebPaid Research · Updated October 7, 2026 · 8 min read

Jeff Cohen today. The Goonies' Chunk is now a founding partner of the entertainment law firm Cohen & Gardner.Image via Wikimedia Commons

He performed the Truffle Shuffle. He befriended Sloth. He gave The Goonies (1985) its beating comic heart. Jeff Cohen was Chunk — Lawrence "Chunk" Cohen — the lovable, clumsy kid at the center of one of the defining adventure films of the 1980s. And then, in his own unforgettable phrase, he went from "chunk to hunk" — and Hollywood stopped calling.

"It was terrible. My first love was acting but puberty had other ideas. It was a forced retirement. I didn't give up acting. Acting gave me up." What happened next is one of the great second acts in Hollywood history: Cohen went to Berkeley, went to UCLA Law, and became one of the entertainment industry's most respected attorneys. This is the verified story.

The Peak: Chunk in The Goonies (1985)

Directed by Richard Donner from a story by Steven Spielberg and a script by Chris Columbus, The Goonies cast the ten-year-old Cohen — born Jeffrey Bertan McMahon on June 25, 1974, in Los Angeles — as Chunk, the heart of the gang of kids hunting One-Eyed Willy's treasure. The Truffle Shuffle alone made him immortal; the performance made him beloved. He also appeared in 1980s television including Family Ties, Little Shots, and Ask Max.

But child stardom is a contract with fine print, and Cohen's came due at puberty. As he tells it, the weight loss that transformed him from "chunk to hunk" was a "career ender" — casting agents no longer wanted what he had become. His last significant acting work included the Disney TV movie Perfect Harmony at 17. By the early 1990s, the acting career was over — not with scandal, but with the quiet arithmetic of a business that had no use for him anymore.

The Pivot: Berkeley, UCLA Law, and Richard Donner's Generosity

Cohen's next move is the part of the story that elevates it from cautionary tale to triumph. He wrote to Goonies director Richard Donner — candidly describing his acting struggles — seeking a recommendation for his college application. Donner read the letter, and he and his wife offered to pay for Cohen's college education.

Cohen earned a Bachelor of Science in business at UC Berkeley, then a Juris Doctor at the UCLA School of Law. The kid who had been typecast out of Hollywood educated his way back in through the front door of the industry's power structure. In 2008, he was named to The Hollywood Reporter's "Next Generation: Hollywood's Top 35 Executives 35 and Under" — an honor he has called the achievement he is most proud of. "That gave me confidence that I was on the right track," he said.

The Lawyer: Cohen & Gardner and the Quan Connection

Today Jeff Cohen is a founding partner of Cohen & Gardner LLP, an entertainment law firm in Beverly Hills, and one of Hollywood's most respected dealmakers — a fixture of Variety's Dealmakers coverage. His office walls carry the history: including a poster signed by Steven Spielberg reading "To Jeff (Chunk) Cohen — you are my favorite Goonie."

The most poetic chapter of his legal career involves his old castmate. When Ke Huy Quan — Data in The Goonies, who had himself quit acting for years before his comeback — needed someone to negotiate his deal for Everything Everywhere All at Once, he turned to Cohen. As Quan told The Hollywood Reporter's Actor Roundtable: the producer "would never imagine that he would have to talk to Chunk to get Data to be in his movie." Cohen did the deal; Quan won the Academy Award. On stage, Quan thanked him: "My Goonies brother for life."

Cohen is open about the novelty of his position: his clients get a kick out of having Chunk as their lawyer, and he has joked that he is often the fifth-most-famous person in any room at work. "I'm very proud that ten-year-old me made such an impact," he has said. Unlike many child stars, he didn't fall through Hollywood's cracks — he climbed out of them, smarter and stronger.

Where Is Jeff Cohen Now?

As of 2026, the 51-year-old Jeff Cohen continues as a founding partner of Cohen & Gardner in Beverly Hills, practicing entertainment law at the highest level. He stays in touch with his Goonies castmates, embraces the Chunk legacy, and remains the rare child actor whose second act eclipsed the first in influence — if not in Truffle Shuffles.

The Goonies Legacy Industry

The Goonies has never really left, and Cohen has had a front-row seat to its immortality — first as a participant, now as a power broker. The film's 40th anniversary in 2025 brought the expected wave of retrospectives, reunion chatter, and tribute pieces, with outlets from Parade to LADbible marking the occasion by checking in on the cast. Cohen, photographed out in Beverly Hills looking thoroughly like a successful attorney, became the anniversary's best story: the kid from the Truffle Shuffle all grown up and negotiating the deals.

The sequel talk is the industry's longest-running will-they-won't-they. In early 2025, Variety reported that Warner Bros. had hired Potsy Ponciroli to write a script for a Goonies sequel, with Steven Spielberg, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Holly Bario, and Chris Columbus attached as producers. No director, no cast, no guarantees — sequel development is where beloved properties go to be optioned — but the machinery is real, and Cohen's position in it is unique. He is not just a former cast member who might cameo; he is an entertainment lawyer who understands exactly how these deals work, because he makes them for a living.

The cast's bond is the other half of the legacy. Forty years on, the Goonies remain famously close — and Cohen's role in Ke Huy Quan's comeback is the proof. When Quan needed someone to negotiate his Everything Everywhere All at Once deal, he did not hire a stranger; he hired Chunk. The symmetry was irresistible to everyone who covered it: Data's deal negotiated by Chunk, the producer reportedly marveling that he had to talk to Chunk to get Data in the movie. Quan won the Oscar and thanked "my Goonies brother for life" from the stage. It is the kind of story Hollywood usually has to invent.

Cohen's own telling of his journey has become a minor classic of show-business wisdom. "I didn't give up acting. Acting gave me up" is the rare child-star quote that is funny, honest, and free of bitterness all at once. He has been equally candid about the absurdity of his current status — the fifth-most-famous person in any room, the lawyer whose clients are delighted to discover their attorney is Chunk. There is no pretense in it, no attempt to distance himself from the role that made him. The ten-year-old who did the Truffle Shuffle and the 51-year-old who closes the deals are, in his telling, the same person: someone who wanted to be in the room, and found two different ways to get there.

That is the final lesson of the Cohen story, and it is a genuinely useful one. The entertainment industry runs on relationships, reputation, and the ability to read a room — skills a child actor learns by age ten if he learns anything at all. Cohen took the performer's education and converted it, through Berkeley and UCLA Law, into the lawyer's practice. The Truffle Shuffle got him into the room. The JD lets him run it.

Then vs Now: Two Chapters

Jeff Cohen's story is Hollywood's best answer to the child-star curse: when acting gave him up, he went and learned the business that gives the orders.

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