Charlie Sheen doesn’t know how he survived it all either. “All those freaking years…” the 60-year-old trails off. “I guess it just wasn’t my time.” He can’t say that it must have been their time – the ones who “left us too soon”. But, he adds, “you’d think having death at arm’s reach would shock a guy into a sooner wake-up call, right?” His mindset now is that “the next hit of anything will kill me”. Sheen doesn’t know this for certain, but it’s what he tells himself. “If fear of something is the motivator to keep you from it, then you’ve gotta wrap your arms around that.”
Sheen’s continued presence in the land of the living is all the more impressive when you run through his history. We’re talking about a dust devil of a man: a walking, talking, blackout-drunk hellion ensnared by booze and blow for much of his first 40 years of fame. He was messy in the Reagan years, messy during Clinton, messy during Obama. He was snorting cocaine while filming Oliver Stone’s Wall Street in 1987, and keeping his eyelids open by inserting ice cubes into his rectum while shooting a movie in 1998. Thirteen years after that, he was terminated from his very lucrative sitcom Two and a Half Men amid a high-profile meltdown that saw him proclaim he had “tiger blood” running through his veins. You can trace the evolution of language alongside his exploits. We used to say that Sheen loved to party with “hookers”. Now we’d say he loved to party with “sex workers”. The world is different. Yet Sheen remains intact, sturdy as a storm door and nearly eight years sober.
Sheen has stayed largely out of the public eye since getting clean. In that time he’s written a memoir – a funny and frank tome titled The Book of Sheen, which has just been published – and filmed a blistering two-part documentary, aka Charlie Sheen, which is sitting at No 1 on Netflix at the time of writing. He’s speaking to me from Chicago, in the midst of his US book tour, while police-car sirens wail audibly outside his hotel room. Typically, a publicist connects a star and a journalist, but Sheen insisted on calling me himself. “I hate knowing somebody else is listening in,” he says. “It makes me f***ing nuts. It’s like I’m Gene Hackman in The Conversation.” On iMessage, his avatar is of a bespectacled, cartoon version of himself, and he responds to good news with a flexed biceps emoji. Winning!
“Have we met before?” Sheen asks. He tells me he often asks this of people, and if we had interacted already, he’d ask me when our meeting took place. “If it’s a year where I was deep in the murk, I say that we’re gonna have to go with their recollection and not mine.” He lets out a raspy laugh. There’s a sitcom-y rhythm to Sheen’s voice, particularly when he talks about his past – a carefully timed build-up, then a punchline. I ask him how he looks so well preserved, given his former hedonism. There’s still a full head of hair and no visible bloat, as if he’s a Dorian Gray of a man, unravaged by age and intoxicants. To put it another way: why do I, at 33, look far more tired than Charlie bloody Sheen?
“I’ve had a pretty healthy diet for the most part, and I’ve stayed active,” he says. “Whether it’s on the treadmill or in a sexual encounter, there’s… um… activity involved.” But historically, he also had a habit of getting incredibly healthy, then flying off the rails, as if claiming his hard-earned reward for all that clean living. “It was this feeling of pre-loading goodness. Like, OK, I’ve done all of that, so now I can just cannonball off the deep end.”
The Book of Sheen goes into all of it. It’s a remarkable read, one that charts Sheen’s bohemian upbringing as the son of the great Martin Sheen (of Badlands and The West Wing), through his early flushes of fame (remember his piercing, leather-jacketed cameo in Ferris Bueller?), to the various times when things went awry. He looks on as his father sinks into genuine madness on the set of Apocalypse Now. He loses his virginity to a Vegas call girl at the age of 15. He recalls how he was so good at pretending to be eaten by a bear that he found himself cast in his first film, 1983’s Grizzly II: The Predator, as one of three clueless teenagers roaming the woods – a young George Clooney and Laura Dern played the other two. There is clearly no ghostwriter here: Sheen likes a comedic misspelling, a “dood” and a “kool”; he is abrasive and funny, contradictory and peeved.
He’s also eager to take charge of a narrative that’s long got away from him. Sheen’s personal life has tended to overshadow what a great actor he can be, and he arguably hasn’t been able to fully flex his dramatic muscles since 1986’s Platoon. There he played, with flush vulnerability, a middle-class army volunteer increasingly rattled by the horrors of Vietnam. He seemed set for real movie stardom.
Other stuff, it goes without saying, got in Sheen’s way: his own misdeeds, sure, but also the vultures. Sheen’s family and friends were always on hand to stage interventions and try to get him into rehab, but they had to deal with an industry – and many bad-faith actors – eager to exploit his struggles. One of the book’s most disturbing moments occurs when Sheen is clearly spiralling in 2011, insisting he is a warlock during interviews with CBS News, and yet is offered millions by the concert promoter Live Nation to turn his rants into a one-man show that tours the country. “I guess ‘enabling’ is the box you can check there,” Sheen says. “The consequences never felt real. If you’re shown a yield sign instead of a stop sign, you’re gonna just roll right into traffic, you know?”
I sense that the book came about in part as a form of self-protection. By nature of the life he’s lived, Sheen has repeatedly been targeted by individuals eager to make a quick buck out of some of his worst moments. In 2015, when he publicly announced that he is HIV-positive, he admitted that he’d previously paid off blackmail attempts over his condition to the tune of $10m. Laying it all out on the page puts the power back in his hands. “There’s a line in the book where I say, ‘I’ve combed through the mental health manual, and I still can’t find “vile exploitation” as a treatment protocol’. That’s how I say ‘f*** you’ to people, to all those gals who’ve tried to shake me down, to all that extortion.”
It also fuelled his decision to open up about his sexual experiences with men. While he says these only began during the more hellish days of his mid-2010s addictions, he is far from regretful. “Just out of respect to the people that were involved, I didn’t want to come across shame-fuelled,” he says. “For years, I kept this stuff hidden. There were threats. ‘We’ve got this video, this photo’. But I just felt, like, OK – let’s do this. Here’s what happened.” He compares sex to a restaurant menu – once you’ve eaten absolutely everything on one side of it, why wouldn’t you flip the menu over and see what the rest is all about? “And honestly, we had to close down the whole damn restaurant,” he jokes. “I had fun with it!”
I like Sheen. And, as I talk to him, I begin to understand the relationships he has with his friends and family (among them his brother, the Eighties teen star Emilio Estevez, and his ex-wife Denise Richards, of Wild Things and James Bond fame) – all of whom seem fiercely loyal to a man who has, often more than once, made them collateral damage in a crisis. He tells me he grapples with the guilt of it every day. “It’s not even like it gets easier the further I get from it,” he says. “I put good and decent people through hell.”
I want to ask about some of the more ambiguous murkiness that isn’t in the book. The real Charlie Sheen lore, if you will. Mentioned in just a single line is his 14-month engagement to the actor Kelly Preston in the late Eighties (he broke it off and “shacked up with world-famous porn star Ginger Lynn”, he writes). Preston, who starred in films such as Twins, Jerry Maguire and Jack Frost, would go on to marry and have children with John Travolta, and died from cancer in 2020. “We had so much fun,” Sheen says. “She was so f***ing cool and f***ing beautiful, and so funny and smart. But I was imagining John and their children reading that stuff and saying, like… ‘Dude, you weren’t part of the stuff that really mattered.’ I could have written a lot more about her. But, just out of respect, I didn’t.”
It’s entirely fair and admirable, but it also means there’s no mention in the book of a particularly infamous moment in Sheen mythology: did he really, as urban legend would have it, shoot Kelly Preston? The story goes back to 1990, the year they split, when Preston was rushed to hospital with bullet shrapnel in her arm. Preston always denied that Sheen had shot her, insisting that it was a freak accident, but the more dramatic version of events has hovered in pop-cultural memory – just one more mad Charlie Sheen tale in a library full of them.
Sheen, though, says it’s always been inaccurate. “I used to carry a little revolver in my back pocket in the Eighties,” he explains. “Stupidly”, he says, he hadn’t kept the chamber sitting under the hammer of the weapon empty, leaving it vulnerable to going off by accident. One night he came home, undressed, tossed his trousers onto the scale in the bathroom of the couple’s Malibu condo, and went to bed. “I didn’t take the gun out of the back pocket.”
The next morning, Preston wanted to weigh herself, so pulled Sheen’s trousers off the scale, making the revolver fall out of the pocket, hit the floor and discharge a bullet into the underside of the toilet bowl she was sitting on. “She gets hit with shrapnel in her calf and her wrist. I’m downstairs and hear this gunshot, like… ‘Holy f***ing s***!’ I come around the corner and she’s already at the top of the stairs, holding her wrist above her head, but her wrist has now bled all over her. It was quite the image, right? I get her down the stairs. I’m soaking towels. I’m calling 911. And then that turned into ‘Charlie Sheen shoots fiancée Kelly Preston’.” He sighs. “I felt terrible. I never carried that weapon again, because it could have been catastrophic. It was the universe giving me a pass – and her, more so.”
The other big story that won’t go away is even darker. In 2020, the former child star Corey Feldman alleged that a 19-year-old Sheen had raped Feldman’s regular collaborator Corey Haim, then aged 13, while the three were making the 1986 teen movie Lucas. It’s a particularly difficult allegation to combat due to Haim’s death in 2010, along with the tangled web of sexual abuse allegations that surround it. Sheen had previously sued another actor, Haim and Feldman’s friend Dominick Brascia, for making the same allegation about an incident on the set of Lucas, with the lawsuit eventually being settled out of court. Brascia, who died in 2018, was subsequently accused of abusing Haim himself by Haim’s mother Judy, who has denied that her son was abused by Sheen.
“It’s gross, man,” Sheen says now. “It’s just so dishonourable to [Haim’s] memory. But the thing that [Feldman] has to really be careful with, is that at some point he will be summoned to a courtroom to present his evidence seriously. That’s where it’s going to wind up if he keeps pressing it. The reason I haven’t done that is because I didn’t want to give him all that attention, and all that potential media credibility or whatever. But no, if he wants to do that, then bring it. And maybe that would put it to rest. But, you know, revenge is a dish best served cold, right? The universe takes its time, and when it gets it right, it gets it fully right.” Sheen laughs. “These are just facts that I’m going to present, but there’s satisfaction in these facts: I’ve got the No 1 show on Netflix right now, and probably in the world, and that dude is doing f***ing Dancing with the Stars. I’m cool with that combo platter.”
Sheen tells me he wants to act again. He’s reading scripts, many of them serious dramas. “I haven’t had access to this quality of material in a very long time,” he says. “I’ve just turned 60, and my dad started The West Wing at 59 – I look at some careers that just go to another stratosphere at a certain age, you know?” Something he’d love to do is work on a project with his longtime friend Sean Penn; he even has a specific idea for it. “I’ve never played a down-on-his-luck, grizzled cop, you know? Just picture Sean and I doing a season of True Detective, right? I’m watching that! You’re watching that! Let’s put that out into the universe.”
We’ve been talking for an hour now, and a makeup artist is on her way up to Sheen’s hotel room to prepare him for a TV appearance. He admits to feeling a little nervous about our interview. “I think this will create a stir, don’t you? Don’t you see this as being a little… stirry?” I tell him I get what he means – but isn’t everything a little stirry when it comes to Charlie Sheen? “That is true,” he laughs.
He’s reminded of one of his favourite baseball stars, Reggie Jackson. He tells me the story: Jackson was a big deal, and knew he was a big deal. He signed to the New York Yankees in 1976, and – while versions differ about what he actually said – apparently insisted to a journalist that he wasn’t planning on sitting idle on the team. “Reggie says, ‘I’m not gonna just blend into this drink, I’m gonna be the straw that stirs the drink.’”
Sheen lets the metaphor hang for a second.
“Good stuff, right?” he laughs. “So you know what, Adam – let’s stir the drink. F*** it.”
‘The Book of Sheen’ is out now via Gallery Books; ‘aka Charlie Sheen’ is streaming on Netflix
