It’s been 14 years since the infamous drug-fuelled TV meltdown, where he ranted about “winning” and having “tiger blood” coursing through his veins, that all but ended the Hollywood career of Charlie Sheen.
Now, eight years sober and having just hit the 60 milestone, he’s opening up about his sordid past like never before in his memoir, The Book Of Sheen, and a Netflix documentary, Aka Charlie Sheen.
RIGHTING WRONGS
“It’s not about me setting the record straight or righting all the wrongs of the past,” the actor insists. “Most of my 50s were spent apologising to the people I hurt. I also didn’t want to write from the place of being a victim… I own everything I did. It’s just me, finally telling the stories in the way they actually happened. The stories I can remember, anyway.”
Charlie’s father, Martin Sheen, and older brother, Emilio Estevez, chose not to take part in the two-part documentary, but Charlie acknowledges the impact his substance abuse had on his famous family.
“I can’t imagine being my dad,” he says. “I really hurt the people I love.”
ALLEGED ASSAULT
The West Wing star first tried to get Charlie clean in 1990, and by 1998, he was signing a warrant to have his son arrested. Charlie was on probation for alleged assault of his then-girlfriend, and had overdosed on cocaine and suffered a stroke.
“It felt like the biggest betrayal you could possibly endure,” Charlie recalls. “[I] saw it as love eventually.”
A lifetime of drug-taking, alcohol abuse and reckless behaviour caught up with Charlie in 2011, when he was fired from the hit show Two And A Half Men for his “dangerously self-destructive conduct”.
By that point, he’d already attempted rehab three times in 12 months and publicly criticised Two and a Half Men showrunner Chuck Lorre.
“Shame is suffocating,” Charlie says in the documentary. “I lit the fuse, you know, and my life turned into everything it wasn’t supposed to be.”
Charlie went from being one of the highest-paid actors in television to an unemployed addict. He feels regret – and confusion – about that chapter, but he hopes it doesn’t define him.
“There are probably a lot of people that still only know me from those viral clips, a guy screaming ‘tiger blood’… That was a moment in a really long career where things just went off the freaking rails,” he says.
BLACKMAIL AND SECRETS
Charlie admits his drug addiction paved the way for his sex addiction, and once he started using crack, he began sleeping with men.
“I flipped the menu over,” he says in the documentary and the book, adding in a Good Morning America interview, “Some of it was weird. A lot of it was f**king fun, and life goes on.”
However, his careless sexual exploits led to him contracting HIV, and he says before he went public with his illness in 2015, some conquests blackmailed him for money to keep his secret.
“It did come with a tremendous amount of extortion,” Charlie says. “And so at the time, I was just like, ‘Let’s just pay to keep it quiet.’”
UNENDING CONFLICTS
Ironically, it was his drug dealer Marco Abeta who helped him on the road to sobriety, with help from Charlie’s dad.
Denise Richards filed for divorce from Charlie in early 2005 when she was pregnant with their second child, Lola, and in his memoir, Charlie reveals he felt “discarded” when the actress left him after “unending conflicts”.
Fast forward two decades, and Charlie and Denise, 54, had an unexpected public reunion at the premiere of Aka Charlie Sheen. He also hit out at third wife Brooke Mueller, admitting he married her out of “loneliness and fear” and that their 2011 divorce was “painful and pricey”.
