Charlie Sheen Reveals the Broken Promise That Made Him Finally Quit Drinking
The actor has been sober for six years after struggling publicly with addiction.
Six years ago, Charlie Sheen made a change for the better, and he was inspired by a time that he let down his daughter. In a new interview with People, the Anger Management star opened up about his decision to stop drinking alcohol in 2017 after breaking a promise to one of his five children. The 58-year-old Sheen said that disappointing his kid "broke [his] heart" and that he stopped drinking cold turkey the very next day.
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"Next month I'll be six years sober," Sheen told People. "I have a very consistent lifestyle now. It's all about single dad stuff, and raising my 14-year-old twin boys Max and Bob." Sheen shares Max and Bob with ex-wife Brooke Mueller. He welcomed his oldest child, Cassandra Estevez, 38, with his high school girlfriend, Paula Profit. He also has two daughters, 19-year-old Sami and 18-year-old Lola, with ex-wife Denise Richards. It was breaking a promise to either Sami or Lola that led to Sheen's sobriety, though he did not specify which.
"I loved drinking in the morning. Loved some scotch in the coffee," Sheen said of his past with alcohol. But, there was one morning in 2017 when he drank and then had to be around one of his daughters.
"One morning I'd forgotten my daughter had an appointment I'd promised to drive her to, and I'd already had a couple of pops that day," the Two and a Half Men star said. "So had to call my friend Tony to take us. We got her there on time, but it broke my heart because she was in the backseat and I could just tell she was thinking, 'Why isn't dad driving?' So I got home and sat with that for the rest of the day. And the next morning I just stopped." According to Sheen, at this point he had already stopped using drugs.
"I think the first month I was like, I'm going to have give it a month, just see if I feel any better, and if my interactions with those that are closest to me improve. And they did," he explained. "And I'm like, all right, I'm going to go another month. And then it got traction. I had momentum. There was just instant evidence that this was the side I needed to be on. I couldn't be in denial about it anymore."
When he was in the depths of his struggles with substance abuse, Sheen made headlines for his erratic interview appearances and social media posts. He was also fired from Two and a Half Men and made offensive and anti-Semitic comments about the show's creator, Chuck Lorre.
"It feels awful. I can't sit here and lie to you," Sheen said of his past during a 2019 interview with Loose Women. "Some of it is very surreal. To this day, I'm not sure how I created such chaos and wound up in that headspace. It's as though there was some alien or demonic possession going on … I wish I could make a lot of it go away."
He said of past attempts at staying sober, "Every other time I was led there though an intervention or rehab or a detox or a thing. This last time—the last time—I couldn't get my daughter to an appointment that she had … The next morning I woke up and I just said, 'Today's the day.'"
Today, Sheen is happy with his life and how he turned it around. "I'm proud of the choices that I've made and the changes I've made to live a life today that will never look like that mess," he told People. "That was some alien version of myself."
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