The record on Anne Heche’s younger son has never quite matched what happened in court, or what he’s said himself.
Atlas Heche Tupper was thirteen years old when a judge told his father he didn’t need the court’s permission to represent him.
It happened on October 11, 2022, inside the probate division of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in Los Angeles. James Tupper, an actor, had asked to be named guardian ad litem for his son, a legal status that would let him formally speak for Atlas in the fight over his mother’s estate. Judge Lee Bogdanoff turned him down and explained why in plain terms.
“You’re his dad,” Bogdanoff said. “You have the ability to appear.”
For four years, coverage of Atlas, the younger of Heche’s two sons, has treated what happened to him as a custody battle. It wasn’t one. He was never at risk of losing his father or his home. What was being fought over, in that courtroom and for years afterward, was control of an estate that turned out to have very little money in it.
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Why it went to court in the first place
Heche, the actress, died on August 11, 2022, six days after a car crash in the Mar Vista neighbourhood of Los Angeles left her in a coma. She had no will, which under California law made her two sons her only heirs: Homer Heche Laffoon, her older son with ex-husband Coleman Laffoon, and Atlas.
Homer, then twenty, petitioned the court that August to run the estate and asked to be named guardian over his younger brother’s share of it. Tupper objected. According to court proceedings reported by TheWrap, he told the judge that Homer had changed the locks on Heche’s apartment the day she died and wouldn’t let Atlas in, not even to collect his laptop, and that Homer was treating him “like his enemy.”
Bogdanoff wasn’t persuaded that any of that made Homer unfit to run the estate. He denied Tupper’s petition, ordered Homer to let Atlas back into the apartment, and set a final hearing for the end of November. On November 30, Homer was named general administrator, with an $800,000 bond attached. His attorney, Bryan Phipps, called it the correct result “both legally and equitably,” adding that Tupper’s objections were “now resolved.”
That settled the custody question, such as it was. Everything after that was about money, or the lack of it.
An estate with almost nothing in it
By the time reporters got a proper look at the paperwork, the numbers behind the fight didn’t match the drama around it.
- Court filings in 2024 put the estate’s known assets at about $110,000, against more than $6 million in claims from seven creditors.
- By March 2025, those claims had narrowed to roughly $4.1 million, most of it from the tenant and homeowners of the house Heche’s car struck, plus a $149,000 loan claim from actor Thomas Jane.
- Homer’s attorney told the court in November 2025 that a tentative settlement had been reached with creditors, pending approval.
- That didn’t hold. In June 2026, Lynne Mishele, the tenant owed $2 million, filed papers disputing that a settlement had been finalized, saying she still hadn’t received a full accounting of the estate.
The estate still hasn’t closed. More than four years after Heche’s death, its assets sit at roughly $290,000 against claims still close to $4.1 million.
In his own words
Since his mother’s death, Atlas has made two public statements of his own, plus a handful of lines in a joint interview with his father. That’s the entire public record of him speaking for himself.
The first came in January 2023, five months after his mother died, in a written statement to the Los Angeles Inquisitor timed to the release of Heche’s memoir, Call Me Anne.
“My mom was the brightest person I’ve ever known,” he said. “She always knew how to solve a problem or help a friend. She always knew the right thing to do. I cannot put into words how grateful I am or how much I miss her.”
Nearly two years passed before he said anything else publicly. In December 2024, in a joint interview with Us Weekly, his father called him a straight-A student. Atlas talked mostly about his father instead.
“He really does everything,” he said. “He’s everything to me. I wouldn’t be where I am at all without him. He drives me everywhere, feeds me. I really love him very much.”
By December 2025, in another Us Weekly interview, Tupper said he and Atlas still talk about Heche “all the time, weekly,” and that Atlas keeps a photo of her by his bed.
He was in his mother’s last film. He still chose tennis
In 2023, Atlas appeared in Wildfire: The Legend of the Cherokee Ghost Horse, a small role credited to Atlas Tupper. It turned out to be his mother’s final film too, shot before the crash and released only after she was gone.
Tupper corrected the obvious assumption that same year. Atlas, he said, “does not want to be an actor. He is really into tennis, he takes it seriously and plays every day for about two hours.”
The tennis claim held up. By the end of 2024, his father was describing him as an advanced junior player hoping to play college tennis or turn pro. He was entered in a sanctioned USTA tournament in Newport Beach in early 2026, just days before his seventeenth birthday.
What changes in March
Atlas turns eighteen next March. The estate that has shaped the public record of his adolescence since his mother died, largely without his own voice in it, still hasn’t closed by then. Once it does, he’ll be old enough to have a legal say in it himself, instead of a father or a judge speaking for him.
Nobody involved has said publicly how the two brothers get along now, years after Tupper told a judge their relationship would become “one of hatred forever.” That question is still open, and so is what comes next for Atlas Heche Tupper once the estate he never asked to be part of is finally settled.
