Ten years after his infamous breakdown, Charlie Sheen would have liked to have done things differently.
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“People have [said to] me, ‘Hey, man, that was so cool, it was so much fun to watch. It was so cool to be a part of, support and all that energy and, you know, we put it on the man, ”” he told Yahoo! Entertainment. “My thinking behind this is, ‘Oh, yes, great. I am so happy to have exchanged early retirement for a … hashtag. ‘”
In 2011, Charlie was the highest paid actor on TV for his role in “Two and a Half Men”. But things soon got out of hand and Charlie said he was “winning” and that he had “tiger blood” in a series of strange interviews.
“There is a time when [former CBS CEO] Les Moonves and his main lawyer, Bruce, were at my house and said, ‘OK, Warner’s jet is fueled on the runway. The car leaves in an hour and goes to rehab, right? My first thought was like really … there is some comic value to my first thought, “he said.” At that moment, when I said, ‘Oh, crap, I finally got the Warner jet.’ That was all I heard. But if I could have gone back in time until that moment, I would have gotten into the jet. And it was that giant turn to the left at that moment that led to, you know, an unfortunate sequence of public and insane events. “
He continued: “There were 55 different ways to deal with this situation and I chose number 56.”
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Over time, Charlie said he grew up with the collapse, but only after he took “absolute control of my role in all of this”. His behavior, he adds, “was desperately youthful.”
“I think it was the drugs or the residual effects of the drugs,” he continued. “And it was also an ocean of stress and a volcano of disdain. It was all self-generated, you know. All I had to do was step back and say, ‘OK, let’s make a list. Let’s list, like, everything what’s cool in my life that’s going on right now. Let’s make a list of what’s not cool. ‘Do you know what I’m saying? And the cool list was really full. The cool list was, like, two things that could be easily discarded. “
Still, Charlie would have liked more people to have seen his behavior at the time as a cry for help.
“They showed up en masse with tracks and songs, all kinds of fanfare and celebrations, you know, what I think was a public display of a mental health moment,” he said. “I had four children and went through two divorces trying to navigate the landscape of being on the most popular show in the known universe, so it was too much. And sometimes you choose a target, you need a scapegoat, you need someone to put it all in. You know “It can’t be me, it has to be him or them or those people. And this is not the road most traveled.”