Jon Cryer Opens Up About Charlie Sheen in New Memoir

WARNER BROS. TELEVISION/CBS(NEW YORK) — Jon Cryer offers his perspective on Charlie Sheen’s final months on their hit sitcom, Two and a Half Men, in an upcoming memoir, So That Happened.

The Hollywood Reporter has published an excerpt from the book, in which Cryer recalls that Sheen was battling personal issues, including drugs, and “didn’t look so good” by the start of the show’s eighth season in the fall of 2010. He shares that Sheen was “gaunt, pale, sallow, even sweaty occasionally. He started talking to himself. Most of all he just looked thinner, in a not-good way.”

Cryer said Sheen’s performance was suffering: “His timing started to go off, too. He was rushing lines. Charlie just wasn’t hitting the jokes the way he used to.”

By 2011, Sheen had ruffled the feathers of series creator Chuck Lorre and various executives, and was fired from the show. The decision resulted in verbal attacks by Sheen fans directed at both Lorre and Cryer, the actor says.

Soon afterward, Sheen launched his Violent Torpedo of Truth tour. Cryer writes, “I knew that Charlie, while being a gifted actor and a remarkably smart man, didn’t have the slightest f***ing idea how to put on a live stage show, even when he wasn’t loaded, but I figured he must have at least one person in his retinue of managers and hangers-on who knew what they were doing. Turns out I was wrong. His first few dates resembled exactly what happens when a bunch of a**holes throw money at a drug addict to make him dance like a monkey.”

Cryer states that while some commentators viewed Sheen as a rebel and truth-teller, “he was simply lashing out at the people who told him the party was over. That he was actually just a human being with a monumental drug dependency mattered less to the pundits than his value as something to write about to alleviate their collective boredom. The fact that he could very well be dead soon was not their concern. In fact, it’d just give them more to write about.”

Though Two and a Half Men wrapped up its run last month, Sheen did not return for the episode.

In the book excerpt, Cryer also reveals how Sheen once asked him to hide a porn stash from his then-wife, Denise Richards; Sheen’s thoughts on prostitution; and how he dated a woman who, it turned out, previously was with Sheen.

So That Happened hits bookstores April 7.


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