Charlie Sheen said fatherhood quickly occupied his life when he got sober eight years ago.
“It turned into just an interesting daily grind of just sudden responsibility and, you know, having to answer the call and it was amazing,” Sheen said Monday, telling an audience that once he “finally put down the bottle,” his children started coming to his home.
Sheen sat down with actor and writer David Duchovny during an event at 92nd Street Y, New York on Monday to discuss the writing process behind his memoir, “The Book of Sheen,” his journey through sobriety and his passion for acting.
The actor battled addiction throughout his decades-long career. Writing about it candidly, as he does in his book set to be released Tuesday, took years of self-reflection, he said.
Sheen grew up on film sets and began creating home movies as a young child, before getting his big break starring in movies like “Platoon” and “Wall Street.” His decorated career in Hollywood, however, was accompanied by decades of drug abuse, legal battles, an HIV diagnosis and messy divorces.
“I’m a good guy,” Sheen said. “Good guys sometimes do some bad things but the only way to stay a good guy is to own that (expletive) and move forward.”
Amid jokes and lighthearted prodding, Duchovny applauded the memoir, which he described as “not vindictive at all. There’s no animus against any other person in the book, even yourself, which I really appreciate. Not just your gentleness with other people, but your gentleness with yourself.”
The book chronicles Sheen’s life from a near-death experience during his birth in 1965 to the moment he decided to get sober in 2017. It carries a unique writing style, with certain words purposefully misspelled and instead written the way Sheen sees them in his mind, he said. Dude, for instance, became “dood.”
Sheen said he was inspired by the narration and rhythm in “Apocalypse Now,” the 1979 film his father, Martin Sheen, starred in.
“I wanted it to feel like the reader was kind of in the room with me or at the small dinner party hearing this story,” he said.
His drug addiction and recovery is at the center of the book and addressed in the latter half of the discussion. Sheen spoke on the “intense sexual component” of a lot of the drugs he grew reliant on, including cocaine. When substance abuse is “the first bridge you build,” the actor said, “that’s the one you’ll keep walking across.”
Sheen said he figured out early on that alcohol helped calm his stutter, which had negatively impacted his acting, and it turned into “the most difficult drug for me to deal with.
“The only part of the drinking that I could navigate was the first hour,” Sheen said. “But, it’s the next 500 hours or just the next 12 hours. So, once I can just abandon that fantasy of living inside that hour, then it is not a big deal.”
Sheen struggled to answer whether he’d be open to acting in the future, noting that “writing the book was the most challenging job I’ve ever had and hands down the most rewarding one.
“It was incredible to have a job where I didn’t have to get approval … it’s just you and the page,” he said. “Maybe I need to write the next thing I act in.”
Sheen’s career began young, making home movies with childhood friends like the Penn brothers, Chris and Sean, in the Malibu, California, neighborhood he grew up in.
Clips from the movies, which had previously only been enjoyed by family and friends, will be featured in Sheen’s upcoming Netflix two-part documentary, “aka Charlie Sheen,” which will be released Wednesday.
The movies, Sheen said, had simple plots, often revolving around a crime, a villain and someone seeking revenge. They were filmed on old cameras with props handed down by his father, Martin Sheen, and the Penn brother’s parents, who were actors and directors themselves.
“Everybody was surfing or skateboarding or doing other stuff and we just found a way to, just kind of emulate or mimic or copy what our parents were doing,” Sheen said.
The documentary, which includes interviews with Sean, felt like “the perfect place for them to finally be put on full display,” he said.
