Charlie Sheen at the LA premiere of his new documentary aka Charlie Sheen. Photo / Getty Images
In a new memoir and documentary, the actor known for Two and a Half Men, Platoon and a debauched life that nearly killed him puts it all out there.
When Charlie Sheen thinks back to the years he spent addicted to alcohol, cocaine, pills and crack, he remembers projectile-vomiting blood over his balcony. Or his hands shaking so severely that he couldn’t pour himself a glass of Patrón Silver.
These memories come back to him without warning, dangling over his thoughts like a mobile over a crib. For nearly eight years, these thoughts, as disturbing as they are, have helped to keep him from crashing back into chaos.
On December 12, 2017, Sheen – a four-time Emmy nominee for Two and a Half Men, and for a time one of Hollywood’s highest-paid television actors on a show with 15 million viewers per episode – got sober. He has been fairly quiet since then, teetering on the verge of becoming one of those what-happened-to-that-guy situations. In 2023, he appeared in a few episodes of the comedy series Bookie, which reunited him with his old Two and a Half Men boss/nemesis, Chuck Lorre. Clips of Sheen asserting that tiger blood runs through his veins no longer light up social media (though you can still find them). He is content hanging out in Southern California with his five kids and three grandchildren, getting smoothies and pedicures with his daughter Lola or watching sports.
He has also spent time alone at home writing a memoir, The Book of Sheen, which was released this week. For years, rumours have swirled about him. The book, with the Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen, also released this week, has him facing those rumours head-on. He calls the book an “all-access, backstage pass to the truth”.
I met Sheen, 60, in August at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows in Santa Monica. The sunny California scene seemed a little cheery for a guy whose memoir begins with the line, “On September 3, 1965, in New York City, at 10:58 p.m., I was born dead.”
That night, his mother, Janet Sheen, and father, Martin Sheen (real name Ramon Antonio Gerard Estevez), watched in panic as Dr Irwin Chabon (intentionally misspelt “Shaybone” in the book to capture “its phonic vibe”) revived their son after an “umbilical-strangulation” emergency. The baby was named Carlos Irwin Estevez in his honour. The family, including Charlie Sheen’s older brothers, Ramon and Emilio, and his younger sister, Renée, eventually settled in Malibu. As Sheen writes in the book, when he started acting and landed his first gig three weeks out of high school, “Carlos evolved into Charlie, and Estevez made way for Sheen”.
Sheen had plenty of material to mine. There was his early childhood spent travelling to his father’s film sets. Young Charlie lunched with Marlon Brando on Apocalypse Now and played a “heated and surreal” game of table tennis with O.J. Simpson on the set of the 1976 movie The Cassandra Crossing. Then came the stutter he developed in third grade. He describes it as a “brain glitch” that still plagues him, and he believes it was one of the things that drove him to drink. There was also the early stardom with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Platoon and years-long. And then, of course, the spectacular years-long crash and burn that spawned a million unflattering headlines and accusations.
“I got overwhelmed and I didn’t seek the help that I needed,” he said of his most tumultuous years, which led to him being fired from Two and a Half Men in 2011. “I just figured, ‘I got this.’ But I didn’t.”
Andrew Renzi, who directed the documentary, described Sheen to me as “an icon as known for his missteps as he is for his belovedness”. Renzi spent about a year getting to know Sheen before they started filming, and he interviewed several people from his life, including his ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller and his Two and a Half Men co-star Jon Cryer, as well as Sean Penn, Lorre, Sheen’s brother Ramon, and Heidi Fleiss, a connection during her brief 1990s reign as the “Hollywood Mad@heream”.
Estevez and Martin Sheen didn’t participate in the film. This will no doubt ignite rumours of familial estrangement, so let’s dispel them. One of the strongest through lines in the memoir is the closeness of the entire Sheen clan. It’s also one of the most heartbreaking.
His parents and his siblings stood by him through interventions, rehabs and near-overdoses. And then came his poorly received touring show in 2011, dubbed My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Death Is Not an Option, which Sheen described as “an unspectacular quasar of a moment”. For years, his family and friends lived with the fear that the phone would ring one day, and it would be that call, the one that anyone who has loved someone who struggles with addiction prays will never come.
When I spoke to Estevez, he said he and his dad didn’t participate in the documentary simply because they watched a rough cut and felt as though their voices, their stories, weren’t necessary. (Martin Sheen declined to comment for this article, as did Richards.) The most surprising part of his brother’s memoir, Estevez said, was how he has managed to keep his sense of humour intact, despite all the darkness.
“I’m not sure I would have been able to do that,” he said. Through the toughest years, when his brother was at his worst, their mum had a mantra that helped them cope: where there’s life, there’s hope.
“I think Charlie has arrived at his truth, and that’s a huge victory for him,” Estevez said.
In 2015, after Sheen told Matt Lauer and millions of Today viewers that he was HIV positive, he said he felt a sense of relief.
“It took the bullets out of so many guns out there still pointed at me,” he said. “The same is true about the stuff in the book and the documentary. This is the best way to cancel hostage demands once and for all and not feel like this is something I need to take to my grave. What’s that saying? We’re as sick as our secrets.”
He is open to acting again but isn’t actively pursuing it. “I’m a little out of practice,” he said. “I could do another sitcom falling out of bed, and that’s nothing against sitcoms. That’s just a gear that is readily accessible. Being right now comfortable enough on camera to deliver something really dramatic would take a little bit of a warm-up.”
Writing the memoir is the hardest and most rewarding job he’s ever had, Sheen said. As he heads into this new phase of his life, one in which his past will likely get pulled out of the shadows and judged all over again, he feels ready. He has nothing left to hide.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Dina Gachman
Photographs by: Molly Matalon
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