Charlie Sheen, of all people, was the talk of Twitter this month, after Sen. Ted Cruz flew to Mexico for vacation with his family as his constituents endured massive power and water outages. As in, "Charlie Sheen called it #winning," after the Texas Republican seemingly blamed his daughters. Sheen was referenced the previous week when another Republican senator, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, "I'm into winning." In that case, one of the comments was, "You know who else was 'winning'? Charlie Sheen."
You wouldn't know that Sheen infamously uttered "winning," along with memorable terms such as "tiger blood," "warlock" and "Adonis DNA" in a series of interviews that began 10 years ago — an eon in internet time — this week. (He's repeated some of them since.)
It was a tumultuous period in the life of Sheen, who was then the highest paid actor on TV. As one of the leads in the popular CBS comedy Two and a Half Men, he earned nearly $2 million per episode at the show's height. But he struggled in his personal life, with issues including domestic violence charges, to which he pleaded guilty in August 2010, and drug addiction. His show went on hiatus so that he could go to rehab, which he chose to do from home. At the same time, he was fighting very publicly with Chuck Lorre, the creator of Two and a Half Men, and he made sure to mention Lorre in this string of sit-downs.
Sheen himself is not amused by people continuing to bring up his infamous 2011 interviews, but he's also not offended they're still talking about what was an intensely difficult time in his life.
"People have [said to] me, 'Hey, man, that was so cool, that was so fun to watch. That was so cool to be a part of and support and all that energy and, you know, we stuck it to the man," Sheen tells Yahoo Entertainment. "My thought behind that is, 'Oh, yeah, great. I'm so glad that I traded early retirement for a f***ing hashtag.'"
He was officially fired from his sitcom on March 7, 2011. Today, he says, it didn't have to be that way.
"There's a moment when [former CBS CEO] Les Moonves and his top lawyer, Bruce, were at my house and they said, 'OK, the Warner jet is fueled up on the runway. Wheels up in an hour and going to rehab, right?' My first thought was sort of like really … there's some comedy value to what my first thought was," Sheen says. "In that moment, when I said, 'Oh, damn, I finally get the Warner jet.' That's all I heard. But if I could go back in time to that moment, I would've gotten on the jet. And it was that giant left turn in that moment that led to, you know, a very unfortunate sequence of public and insane events."
He has many regrets about what he did during that time, especially demanding a higher salary. He says now that he wasn't being a team player.
"There was 55 different ways for me to handle that situation, and I chose number 56. And so, you know, I think the growth for me post-meltdown or melt forward or melt somewhere — however you want to label it — it has to start with absolute ownership of my role in all of it," Sheen explains. "And it was desperately juvenile."
He says he had agreed to do things their way, and he wasn't living up to his end of the bargain.
"I think it was drugs or the residual effects of drugs … and it was also an ocean of stress and a volcano of disdain. It was all self-generated, you know," Sheen says of what prompted the incident. "All I had to do was take a step back and say, 'OK, let's make a list. Let's list, like, everything that's cool in my life that's going on right now. Let's make a list of what's not cool.' You know what I'm saying? And the cool list was really full. The not cool list was, like, two things that could've been easily dismissed."
He sums it up as, "I was getting loaded and my brain wasn’t working right."
The reaction to Sheen's bizarre behavior was intense, he admits now: "To say it was a tad overwhelming is a radical understatement."
