Hollywood is filled with actors who have overcome mental, se**xual, eating, or substance addiction.
Sobriety can not only feel like an uphill battle but also a life long struggle. From Drew Barrymore and Bradley Cooper to Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Lee Curtis, these are few of the names who aren’t afraid to tell their tale.
Here, we share more high-profile stories of actors who have publicly struggled with addiction and how they managed to turn around and live a clean and sober life.
Robert Downey Jr.
The actor spend his teenage years and early 20s in and out of rehab for cocaine, heroin, and alcohol abuse. He was also arrested multiple times on drug-related charges in the late 90s, before he finally got clean in 2003 with the support of loved ones.
After his recovery, the actor revived his stalled acting career with Marvel’s 2008 movie Iron Man, and he’s been one of the highly-paid actors ever since.
He told Vanity Fair this about addiction in 2014: “Job one is get out of that cave. A lot of people do get out but don’t change. So the thing is to get out and recognize the significance of that aggressive denial of your fate, come through the crucible forged into a stronger metal.”
Bradley Cooper
When he was first trying to make it on hollywood, the actor struggled for years with drug and alcohol abuse that threatened to ruin his life and career.
In 2006, Cooper was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine. He able to beat the charges, but not before the arrest made public.
After the arrest, Cooper cleaned up and began to focus on healthier habits.
Bradley Cooper told GQ in 2013 that the reason he got sober was because he realized that “if I continued it, I was really going to sabotage my whole life.”
“Anytime you’re trying to tell the truth you need to go to places and use things that have happened to you, or you’ve read about or experienced,” he said. “And that’s all part of the beauty of turning whatever things you’ve gone through into a story. I find that to be very cathartic.”
Cooper also said he was grateful to be sober when he played Jackson Maine in “A Star Is Born.”
“Thank goodness I was at a place in my life where I was at ease with all of that, so I could really let myself go,” he said. “I’ve been very lucky with the roles I’ve had to play. It’s been a real blessing. I hope I get to keep doing it.”
He’s since become one of Hollywood’s leading actors, winning several academy awards, and is an inspiration to those struggling with addiction.
Tom Holland
The Spider-Man star stopped drinking alcohol in 2022 after chosing to participate in Dry January.
During that time the actor realised that he was “enslaved” to the drink after founding himself thinking about drinking the whole time.
Holland said he was “definitely addicted to alcohol” and didn’t know how to socialize without drinking.
“I was really, really struggling and I started to really worry that maybe I had an alcohol problem. So I decided that I would wait until my birthday, which is June 1,” the actor said. “I said to myself, ‘If I can do six months without alcohol, then I can prove to myself that I don’t have a problem.’ And by the time I got to June 1, I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”
“It’s honestly been the best thing I’ve ever done,” Holland added. “I’m a year and a half into it now. It doesn’t even cross my mind. I’ve found amazing replacements that I think are fantastic, ones that are also really healthy.”
Since he changed his lifestyle, Holland noticed that was ‘the happiest he’s ever been’, he could ’sleep better” and “handle problems better.”
Ben Affleck
Throughout his career, Ben Affleck’s relationship with sobriety has been an uphill battle filled with setbacks and triumphs.
The actor first checked into rehab in 2001 and has continued to work on his sobriety through the years.
At the time, he told a Fox News reporter, “I just wanted to stop. I started regretting some things I did when I was drunk.”
Affleck has been in rehab three times, “Relapse is embarrassing, obviously. I wish it didn’t happen. I really wish it wasn’t on the internet for my kids to see,” he shared with The New York Times in a July 2021 interview.
And in March 2017, the actor took to his Facebook page to talk about going back to rehab.
“I have completed treatment for alcohol addiction; something I’ve dealt with in the past and will continue to confront,” he wrote. “I want to live life to the fullest and be the best father I can be.”
his last visit to rehab was when his ex Jennifer Garner took him in August 2018. “It took me a long time to fundamentally, deeply, without a hint of doubt, admit to myself that I am an alcoholic. The next drink will not be different.”
Daniel Radcliffe
The star has opened up about his alcoholism that staretd when he was still shooting Harry Potter , he shared with BBC Radio 4 in 2020, “A lot of drinking that happened toward the end of Potter and for a little bit after it finished, it was panic, a little bit not knowing what to do next—not being comfortable enough in who I was to remain sober.”
The actor opened up about his uncertainty about the future post Harry poter as the movie franchise came to a close. He said that he was in panic when the franchise ended, afraid of not geting work after it.
In a conversation with Marc Maron for his “WTF” podcast in 2015, Daniel Radcliffe opened up about that, “There was definitely a time when I was coming out of ‘Potter’ and I was into the real world, suddenly I was in a world where I’m not going to have that consistency anymore,” he said. “I was pretty inconsolable on the last day of ‘Potter.’ I was really worried. I was living alone, and I think I was really freaked out … I drank a lot, as has been recorded.”
The road to sobriety begun after he started performing in broadway in 2008 acting in the play Equus.
He dropped drinking altogether to focus on his career and shared to Off Camera: “I woke up one morning after a night going like, ‘This is probably not good.’” And he has been sober since 2010.
Zac Efron
The actor made headlines when he went to rehab in 2013. The news came as a suprise as he was known to the public as dysney’s golden boy.
Not knowing how to cope with emmense fame following the success of High School Musical franchise, he turned to cocaine and alcohol.
“I was drinking a lot, way too much,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “It’s never one specific thing. I mean, you’re in your 20s, single, going through life in Hollywood, you know? Everything is thrown at you.”
Efron shared to Elle in 2016 that his trip to rehab really gave him a necessary wake-up call about his addiction. “There was a moment when my morning routine was, like, ‘Get up and google yourself.’ But that stopped, dramatically and instantly”
After the rehab, tohe also joined Alcoholics Anonymous and started seeing a therapist to help him on his journey, but added that battling addictions is a “never-ending struggle.”
Drew Barrymore
The barrymore’s family had it’s fair shair of success and struggles, from addictions to mental health struggles including drew barrymore’s father.
The actress acting career started at the young age of 6. So did her struggle with addiction, as she was only 13 when she first went to rehab in 1989.
She says she started drinking when she was 9, when her mother used to take her clubing and letting her drink.
She quickly moved on to marijuana and cocaine in her teenage years.
To cope with her divorce from Will Kopelman, Barrymore leaned on alcohol which lead to a down roll spiral.
Cameron Diaz, a friend of hers, said that was “difficult to watch” her struggle during that time.
In 2021, she shared that she hasn’t had a drink in over two years marking a big milestone in her journey.
“I’m just going to say something for the first time in a long time: I have not had a drink of alcohol in two and a half years,” she said on CBS Mornings. “And it was something that I realized just did not serve me in my life.”
She added, “It’s so funny. When we reveal ourselves and our truths and the things we’ve worked so hard for, it’s so liberating and vulnerable all at the same time.”
Barrymore shared that the word sober doesn’t mean that she is cured. “I kept thinking, ‘I’ll master this. I’ll figure it outm,'” said in 2023. “And finally, I just realized: ‘You’ve never mastered this, and you never will.'”
The actor and talk show host has since gone on to have a fruitful career, working on her relationship with her mother, and maintain sobriety.
When she talked to The Guardian about whether or not she’s going to talk about her past with her children, Barrymore said: “I’m not going to pretend I am not who I am. I’m going to show them how it got me to where I am now.”
Matthew Perry
The late Matthew Perry, best known for playong Chandler on Friends, has battled substance abuse for his entire adult life.
His relationship with alcohol has started at just 14 years old, and became out of control when friends became a global success.
His addiction to prescription drugs started when he had a skiing accident filming Fools Rush In with selma hayek.
“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said in a 2022 profile in The New York Times
In a sit-down interview with Diane Sawyer in October 2022, he admitted to taking 55 Vicodin per day.
In a November 2022 interview with CBS Radio, Perry said he won’t rewatch Friends “because I was brutally thin and being beaten down so badly by the disease…. I could tell season by season by how I looked, and I don’t think anybody else can, but I certainly could.”
In 2018, after a life-threatening two-week coma, from a colon burst from opioid abuse, Perry decided it was time for a change. “The doctors told my family that I had a 2% chance to live,” he recalled.
Perry released a raw memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, on November 1, 2022, discussing his addiction.
In his memoir, the “Friends” star revealed that his recovery journey cost him $9 million for 6,000 AA meetings, at least 15 stints in rehab, and dozens of detoxes.
Before his sudden death, the actor revealed in 2022 interview with the New York Times, that he was sober for 18 months.
Jamie Lee Curtis
« The greatest single accomplishement of her life » that’s how The actress calls her recovery journey from alcohol and drug addiction.
“Getting sober remains my single greatest accomplishment,” Curtis said. “Bigger than my husband, bigger than both of my children, and bigger than any work, success, failure. Anything.”
In an interview with people in 2018, Curtis shared that she became addicted to prescription painkillers for 10 years, when she was descriped for after a cosmetic procedure in 1989.
“for my hereditary puffy eyes,” resulting in a prescription that changed her life. “I had a 10-year run, stealing, conniving,” she told People. “No one knew. No one.”
The actress recalls how she knew she had hit rock bottom in the summer of 1998. That’s when her sister Kelly visited her bringing along prescribed painkillers for a rib injury.
“I knew she had them in her suitcase in our guest room closet,” she told the publication, crying at the memory. “I basically took all her opiates. When she was leaving I knew she would pack her suitcase and find her pills missing. I knew I had to acknowledge to her what I had done, and so I wrote her a note and left it on her suitcase. I came home that day, and she put her arms around me and told me she loved me and she was concerned about me and she was unwilling to watch me kill myself.”
She kept her addiction a secret from everyone, until she went to her first recovery meeting in 1999. The same day she confessed her addiction to her filmmaker husband Christopher Guest. “He was incredulous that he’d never noticed,” Curtis said.
She also added that she’s been sober ever since. Curtis is an outspoken advocate for drug misuse awareness and changes in opiate policy.
Dennis Quaid
In an interview with the Sunday Times in 2018, Quaid opened up about his cocaine addiction throughout the ’80s.
“I liked coke,” he said. “I liked it to go out. I missed it for quite a while. I was doing about two grams a day.”
The actor said growing up in the ’60s and ’70s people had ” a completely different attitude” towards the drug.
“It was even in some movie budgets. I was basically doing cocaine pretty much on a daily basis during the ’80s,” he admitted in 2018.
He added, “I spent many, many a night screaming at God to ‘Please take this away from me and I’ll never do it again, cause I’ve only got an hour before I have to be at work.’ Then at 4 o’clock in the afternoon I’d go, ‘Oh it’s not so bad.'”
He said that he first went to rehab after ‘seeing himself dead’.
“I had one of those white-light experiences where I saw myself being dead and losing everything I had worked for my whole life, so I put myself in rehab,” he said.
So he decided to start taking control of his life and beat this addiction. He confessed to his then-fiancée Meg Ryan about what was going on. Then, he sought help. “That was the end of the love affair with me and cocaine.”
He even stopped drinking for 10 years while kicking his drug addiction but later got back into alcohol.
“I started drinking again, because alcohol was never my problem,” he said. “I never liked the feeling of being drunk. I would do coke and I would use alcohol to come down.”
