The world knows Gary Coleman for his iconic portrayal of Arnold Jackson on Diff’rent Strokes, but a new Peacock documentary is revealing the man behind the hit series, and both the highs and lows of his life before he passed unexpectedly and tragically at age 42 in 2010.
Gary, which debuted on Peacock Aug. 29, follows the child star from his very first days on set all the way to the final moments of his life. While Coleman had some incredible experiences throughout his career — becoming the highest-paid child actor on TV for a time and crafting one of the most beloved sitcom characters, to name a few — the doc makes it clear his life wasn’t without its challenges, mental health struggles among them.
While Coleman starred on Diff’rent Strokes for nearly a decade, the show was canceled in 1986 when Coleman was 18. At that point, the actor was “exhausted” and “spent,” his friend Dion Mial says in the doc.
Mial claims Coleman went into “a very deep depression for months” after the show ended, and had “vowed never to work again in the entertainment business.” However, Mial says, “no one would accept that.” Instead, they pushed Coleman to keep working, and Mial says his late friend eventually reached a breaking point a year after Diff’rent Strokes came to an end.
“About a year later, I was at home and about 10:30, my phone rang. And it was Gary. He said, ‘Well, I just wanted to call you to say goodbye. I cannot take this anymore. It’s not worth living. I’m gonna kill myself,’” Mial recounts.
Alarmed, Mial rushed over to Coleman’s home to make sure he was OK. He remembers, “I raced over in the deepest fear that anybody could imagine, not knowing what I was going to find.”
Thankfully, Mial’s worst fear for Coleman didn’t come true. He says, “He was sitting alone with a keyboard, and he was just tapping single notes at a time,” crying as he recounts the difficult moment with his late friend.
“We sat and we cried. And I held him and comforted him, and just let him weep. And I concluded, you know, you don’t deserve this,” Mial says. “You don’t deserve to go through this. And you do deserve to take a break. To get away to unfamiliar people, unfamiliar places.”
Gary details Coleman’s struggles with mental health once again while recounting the actor’s experience working as a security guard in the late ’90s. Coleman faced assault charges in 1999 after being accused of punching a woman asking him for an autograph in Hawthorne, Calif. He was given a 90-day suspended sentence and a $400 fine, but the event was another blow to his mental wellbeing, his friends say in the doc.
“He felt that really in that moment the bottom had fallen out once again. And it was horrible,” Mial says. “Yet another opportunity for the public to make fun of him, to cast dispersions upon him and to belittle him.”
His friend Anna Gray adds, “He was really depressed. He stopped going out as often. He didn’t trust people anymore. This was one of those experiences that changed him.”
Mial delivers an especially heartbreaking detail when he says that Coleman “constantly referred to himself as God’s punching bag.”
“He felt like one of life’s jokes, and that he was never meant to be a person of good fortune,” Mial adds. “In one note that he left behind for me, he writes, ‘I am a hurt, confused, broken man with no one and nowhere to turn to. I am more sad now than I have ever been, and I feel suicidal, but of course because of fear, frustration and no real means of doing it painlessly, I can’t release my soul from the ongoing madness, betrayal and misery that surrounds my life.’
After he finishes reading, he says, “It’s horrible. This kind of loneliness, this kind of hopelessness.”
Gary is now streaming on Peacock.
If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 988.
The post Peacock’s Gary Coleman Doc Reveals Child Star’s Heartbreaking Depression Struggles After ‘Diff’rent Strokes’: “I Cannot Take This Anymore” appeared first on Decider.
