Charlie Sheen wants to free himself from feeling like he’s being held hostage by his private life.
To shed that sensation, the “Wall Street” star decided to talk about his sexual past in his memoir, “The Book of Sheen,” which comes out Tuesday.
People from his past “had video things or whatever and had stuff over me,” the actor told Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America.” “So I was kind of held hostage, you know, and that’s just a bad feeling.”
Sheen talked Friday on the morning show about how his drug addiction led him to have sex with men — he called it “the other side of the menu” — and how he was forced to pay people to keep those sexual encounters out of the public eye.
He also hit on less salacious revelations like the connection between his stutter and his drinking. In the book, Sheen writes about masking his inability to pronounce certain words and sounds with drinking alcohol. “Drinking soften the edges,” he told Strahan. “It gave me freedom of speech.”
After joining the ABC show “Spin City” in 2000 and reading the script, he said, Sheen stopped hiding his speech impediment and asked for help.
“When in doubt, just be human enough to be vulnerable,” he told “GMA.”
Sheen also reveals in the book that some folks wanted to expose his HIV-positive diagnosis before he went public with it in 2015, according to People. Sheen said on “GMA” that finally revealing his diagnosis was a “tremendous relief.”
The “Two and a Half Men” actor — whose paycheck for the sitcom was estimated at as much as $2 million per episode — infamously landed in rehab in 2010 after threatening his ex-wife Brooke Mueller with a knife, trashed his room at the Plaza Hotel in New York and in 2011 was fired from his CBS sitcom amid a meltdown of epic proportions.
During the “GMA” interview, Strahan asked the actor if he had any regrets.
“I do,” Sheen said, “but there’s no value in them.”
A documentary about the actor’s life, “aka Charlie Sheen,” will premiere Wednesday on Netflix. Sheen, who has been sober for eight years, told People he decided to be vulnerable about his past because he wants to own his truth and his stories.
“The stories I can remember anyway,” he said.
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