PALACE LEE / Barcroft Media via Getty Images

PALACE LEE / Barcroft Media via Getty Images(NEW YORK) — (NOTE LANGUAGE) — While we can’t blame you for losing track of time nowadays, even considering the pandemic and everything that was 2020, it might be hard to imagine that Charlie Sheen’s infamous meltdown was 10 years ago. 

A decade ago this month, Sheen was the highest paid actor on TV, with his CBS hit Two and a Half Men, until the gig and his personal life imploded — at times live on TV and streaming on his own short-lived video channel. 

The actor went on a tear against the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre, gave a frenetic series of interviews where he entered the words #winning and “Tiger Blood” into our pop culture lexicon, and then was fired. 

And then there was that disastrous Violent Torpedo of Truth stage tour. 

“I was getting loaded and my brain wasn’t working right,” Sheen recalls to Yahoo! Entertainment.

“People have [said to] me, ‘Hey, man, that was so cool, that was so fun to watch…” My thought…is, ‘Oh, yeah, great. I’m so glad that I traded early retirement for a f–king hashtag.'”

He says, “There was 55 different ways for me to handle that situation, and I chose number 56. …And it was desperately juvenile.” 

He explains, “I…needed someone to reach out to and say, ‘Hey, man…How can we help?’ And instead they showed up in droves with…all types of fanfare and celebration of…what I think was a very public display of a mental health moment.”

In 2015, the actor revealed he’d been HIV positive around the time of the meltdown, and in 2017 he told Good Morning America he was enrolled in an FDA study for an experimental HIV treatment. 

Now, however, he’s on the comeback trail, with a new show in development, he tells Yahoo!.

By Stephen Iervolino
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