As he reflects on his life and career, Charlie Sheen says nothing’s off limits — and he proves it in his new Netflix documentary “aka Charlie Sheen.” The two-part program, which premieres Sept. 10 on Netflix, follows the actor has he dissects some of his darkest moments as an addict.
“The stuff that I plan on sharing, I had made a sacred vow years ago to only reveal to a therapist,” he says. “I think there’s so many stories and so many ingrained images in people’s minds about the concept of me. It’s not even like think of me as a person. They think of me as a as a concept or a specific moment in time.”
Some of those low points you already know — Sheen’s 2011 firing from “Two and a Half Men” came as part of a very public (“tiger blood,” “winning”) meltdown that’s now cemented as part of his lore, for example.
But in recent years, Sheen seems to have cleaned up his act. He tells the “aka Charlie Sheen” documentarians that he’s seven years sober — and he has a lot to atone for. Something the two-part program doesn’t mention is how he has already made amends with “Two and a Half Men” exec producer Chuck Lorre, and even appeared last year in Lorre’s recent comedy “Bookie.” He also appears to have a cordial relationship with ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, both of whom appear in the doc (directed by Andrew Renzi).
Also seen in “aka Charlie Sheen” are brother Ramon Estevez, childhood friends Sean Penn and Tony Todd, former drug dealer Marco, co-stars Jon Cryer and Chris Tucker, and famed “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss.
Sheen is also releasing the memoir “The Book of Sheen,” which hit shelves Tuesday. Here are a few things we learned from “aka Charlie Sheen”:
This is the first time Sheen is speaking publicly about having sex with men, which he describes as discovering “the other side of the menu.”
“It’s fucking liberating,” he says. “A train didn’t come through the side of the restaurant, a fucking piano didn’t fall out of the sky. No one ran into the room and shot me. It’s uncharted.”
Sheen has no regrets about that either. “So what? Some of it was weird. A lot of it was fucking fun, and life goes on,” he says. “Look at the state of the fucking world. Look at the unflushed fucking toilet that we live in today and where we’re headed. This, the other side of that menu really fucking matters? If someone doesn’t want to hire me because ‘he did all that shit’? Whatever, didn’t want to work with you anyway. Now I want to nuke the other side of the menu? No, I don’t. Because that wouldn’t make any sense.”
Sheen’s drug abuse got so bad that he had an 18-hour nosebleed, and once needed to stick a cube of ice up his butt to shoot a scene.
Sheen recalls an 18-hour nosebleed from one cocaine bender that caused a problem when shooting a scene. “I got the director, Brett Ratner, to agree to make that shot go away forever,” he says. “And he did, because we’ve never seen it right. And that’s when it starts to get that the priorities couldn’t be more wonky. I was taking jobs to just fuel the habits.”
For the film “Free Money,” Sheen said the director noticed that he looked like he was falling asleep on camera. So Sheen asked for a glass of ice.
“There was a little bathroom, and I went in there, and I took an ice cube, and I shoved it up my butt,” he says. “I’ve never done that before, and, man, I was wide awake just enough to get back on the mark and finish the bucket scene with an ice cube in my ass.”
Sheen thoroughly denies and blasts allegations by Corey Feldman that Sheen sexually assaulted Corey Haim.
“Absolutely fucking bullshit,” Sheen says. “I should have taken legal action against Feldman. But I didn’t feel like giving that clown that much more credit. We were friends back in a day or so I thought. It’s a piece of vile fiction. The guy’s mom came out and said this is impossible.”
Sheen says he has always been upfront about his HIV status with partners, and that he paid those partners to keep his diagnosis secret.
“I was wearing condoms, and I was, by then, completely undetectable,” he says. “They’d be going into the drawers, my bathroom, photographing my meds. Then I’d stop seeing them and that’s what would come out, the threat of ‘we’re going to expose your thing. I had to pay them.”
Sheen said at the lowest number, it was $500,000 for a single person. “But you know what, within all the craziness, there’s only one person in the entire fucking mix that still has this thing, that has it, period, and that’s this guy,” he says. “Nobody got this from me. Period, the end, full stop, nobody did so.”
A drunk Charlie Sheen once took the controls of a jetliner, unbeknownst to the 300 or so passengers.
The “aka Charlie Sheen” doc opens with a harrowing tale, as Sheen recounts being on honeymoon with his first wife, Donna Peele. Sheen and Peele were on a plane and tensions were already high between the two — while Sheen started drinking heavily in his seat. The plane navigator spots Sheen and invites him to the cockpit, where the captain asks for a photo.
Sheen asked the pilot if he could wear his uniform and sit in his seat. The pilot obliges — and then the co-pilot flips off the autopilot function. Sheen, completely wasted, is now flying the plane.
“I’m there drunk, close to 300 people asleep behind me, an angry bride 20 feet behind me, and I start guiding this plane,” he says. “And then they saw that maybe this might get away from them.” The co-pilot quickly turned the autopilot back on.
Charlie Sheen was offered the lead role in “The Karate Kid,” but his father convinced him to turn it down.
Sheen had already booked a low-budget film, “Grizzly II,” which also starred then-unknowns George Clooney and Laura Dern. But then Sheen was offered the lead role in “The Karate Kid,” which required him to immediately start karate training. He couldn’t because of “Grizzly II,” and his father stressed that he couldn’t quit that role.
“I took it to my dad, and I said, ‘I got this thing, and it’s a life changing opportunity. They they want me in karate training tomorrow.’ And he said, ‘Well, there’s a problem here. You gave this other company your word. I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s forgettable, and it’s like eight lines.’ He says, ‘None of that matters. You gave him your word. Your word in this business is going to carry you a lot further than one big movie.’ So that that went away.”
“The Karate Kid” went to Ralph Macchio, and made him a star. “I was pissed,” Sheen says. “I thought I was terribly misled.” But in hindsight, Sheen notes that Macchio may have ultimately been limited in roles because he was so identified with that franchise. “I don’t want to say I dodged a bullet,” he says. “Maybe I dodged a back kick.”
Heidi Fleiss is still not happy that Sheen testified against her in the “Hollywood Madam” trial.
Sheen’s name was at the forefront of Fleiss’ arrest for running a prostitution ring because he used traveler’s checks for some services, rather than cash. “Otherwise it never would have come out,” she says. “I wouldn’t have said anything. I’ve never said anything about anyone.”
But Sheen says the U.S. attorney threatened him with a “pandering” charge for sharing the women with friends, which would have meant three to five years I jail. “I don’t want to be a rat, but there was really no other way out of it.”
Fleiss disagrees. “Robert Mitchum, he was arrested for marijuana. They said, ‘tell us your dealer.’ And he said, ‘charge me the crime.’ Charlie should have said, ‘charge me with the crime,’” she says. “He’s a crybaby rich boy. He’s a rich kid from Malibu. They’re not gonna do shit to him. He’s Charlie Sheen. He was at his peak, then they’re not gonna do anything to him. Are you kidding me?”
It was Guns n’ Roses guitarist Slash who convinced Sheen to hit rehab after one major bender.
In 1998, Sheen had a stroke after an overdose, but then quickly left rehab. At that point, his father, Martin, asked California police to make an arrest to help him overcome his addiction. “I had a huge resentment about it, and I said, ‘just give me a little bit of space and mind your own fucking business. I can get a handle on this.’”
Ultimately, Sheen was considering fleeing the country when he stopped at Slash’s house. “He said, ‘Dude, I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone before in this kind of shape,’” Sheen recalls. “This is Slash, right? GNR, rock God, the life he’s led. And he said, ‘No, dude, you’re out of options. You got to get to rehab. You got to save yourself, man.’ And coming from him the way he presented, it was like, whoa. Message delivered.”
Sheen’s drug dealer and friend Marco helped wean him off crack by reducing its potency over time.
“I just became very fond of him,” Marco says. “Damn, that’s my bro, right there. I can’t let that dude die. He’s too fucking cool. His drug counselor at the time told me, is there any way that you can make it less potent for him? And I told him I’ll try. So, little by little, I started to reduce the amount of cocaine that I was using to cook the crack. It looked exactly the same, but it was just less potent. It took about a good year and a half, but that’s why he got sober. He just got tired of smoking about crack, which he thought was good crack. He just wanted to stop doing it.”
Says Sheen: “They were trying to get me off of crack by making weaker crack. I was quite impressed when I found out later, I didn’t know when it was going on. Talk about being forced to think so far out the box that you land on that.”
Sheen’s father, Martin Sheen, and brother Emilio Estevez declined to participate in “aka Charlie Sheen.”
“I hope he sees some of this as the love letter to him that it is,” Sheen says in describing some of his childhood moments with Martin Sheen — including how he helped nurse his father back to health after he had a heart attack in the Philippines while filming “Apocalypse Now.”
“Emilio and dad, they fully support me,” Sheen says. “They’re rooting for me in ways you can’t even imagine. But I can’t expect people to revisit all the drug abuse and all the shitty choices that hurt the people I love… I completely understand why they chose not to [participate in the doc].”
“Two and a Half Men” star Jon Cryer is still a bit ambivalent about being a part of this documentary.
“I worked with Charlie Sheen for eight years,” Cryer says. “And if you wonder what it’s like to work with Charlie Sheen for eight years, when I started, I had hair. I had some trepidation about participating in this, partially because part of the cycle of Charlie Sheen’s life has been that he messes up terribly, he hits rock bottom, and then he gets things he gets things going again. And he brings a lot of positivity in his life, and that’s when he burns himself out again. He just can’t help but set that house on fire, and I didn’t want to be a part of that cycle. I’m not here to build him up and I’m not here to tear him down. But I sure hope this doesn’t go bad.”
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