It’s been 14 years since Charlie Sheen’s infamous drug-fuelled TV meltdown, when his rants about “winning” and having “tiger blood” coursing through his veins ended his Hollywood career. Now eight years sober and having just hit the milestone of 60, 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.
“It’s not about me setting the record straight or righting all the wrongs of the past,” the actor insists.
“Most of my fifties 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.”
Depths of addiction
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 showrunner Chuck Lorre.
Charlie says in the documentary, “Shame is suffocating. I lit the fuse and my life turned into everything it wasn’t supposed to be.”
Charlie went from being one of the highest-paid actors in TV 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.”
Extorted for his flings with men
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, “Some of it was weird, a lot of it was f**king fun and life goes on.”
However, Charlie’s 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.
“At the time, I was just like, ‘Let’s just pay to keep it quiet.’”
Ironically, it was his drug dealer Marco Abeta who got him on the road to sobriety, with help from Charlie’s dad.
Trouble with his exes
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. In the doco, he admits he married third wife Brooke Mueller out of “loneliness and fear”, and that their 2011 divorce was “painful and pricey”
His Father’s
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.”
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 allegedly assaulting his then-girlfriend and had suffered a stroke while overdosing on cocaine.
Recalls Charlie, “It felt like the biggest betrayal you could possibly endure. But I saw it as love eventually.”
