- Charlie Sheen’s new memoir, The Book of Sheen, spans his childhood with famous dad, Martin Sheen, through to his firing from Two and a Half Men and HIV diagnosis.
- Sheen provides new details on many of the most ignominious moments of his life, including his dismissal from the hit sitcom and the wild interviews that came after.
- The actor says much of his mental state at the time was a result of an overuse of testosterone cream.
Charlie Sheen will be the first one to tell you that he was doing a lot of drugs in the run up to his firing from Two and a Half Men.
But in his new memoir, The Book of Sheen (out today), Sheen explains that it wasn’t actually the crack or the painkillers that fueled the worst of his behavior in the days leading to and following his public dismissal from the hit sitcom — it was a street legal testosterone cream that he was using to get in shape.
After then head of CBS Les Moonves visited Sheen’s house, offering the company’s private jet to fly Sheen to rehab, Sheen claims that he declined the offer and quit all the drugs he was doing cold turkey.
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“It didn’t go as planned,” he writes. “What I chose not to quit was the testosterone cream that I was slathering on in mind-altering gobs like a f–ken Pond’s commercial. After all, it was ‘legal.’ I’d been using it to get my body back into shape, not knowing that at the same time I was being shape-shifted.”
He continues, “That drug is known to metabolize into the identical psych profile an anabolic steroid will produce. Anyone who bore witness to the raging demon I melded with will hopefully glean some clarity for what my state of mind was up against.”
Sheen takes care to explain that he doesn’t share this detail to attempt to condone his behavior, so much as a clarification of the sequence of events leading up to his implosion. “Not making excuses or asking for a pass,” he writes. “Just putting it out there there as a detail that may have been confused with a laundry list of other potential suspects.”
He then adds, cheekily, “I’ve heard great things about the drug when used responsibly, but let’s keep it real — drugs and responsible are two words I never made of habit of cramming into the same sentence.”
Sheen starred opposite Jon Cryer as brothers Charlie and Alan, respectively, on the first eight seasons of the Emmy-winning series before Sheen’s dismissal in 2011 over “dangerously self-destructive conduct,” per a letter from Warner Bros. Television attorneys at the time. That behavior included drug use and related incidents, and disparaging comments about series co-creator Chuck Lorre.
In the wake of his firing, Sheen had a highly publicized meltdown, including an infamous 20/20 interview with Andrea Canning in which he claimed to have “tiger blood” and coined the hashtag, “winning.”
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In the memoir, Sheen blames this same testosterone cream for feeding his state of mind going into that encounter.
Sheen also tells a story of how in the days leading up to that television interview, he begged a friend to introduce him to San Francisco Giants baseball player, Brian Wilson. Sheen claims that it was Wilson on a phone call who first gave him these phrases that would become the subject of memes across the internet, including “tiger blood,” “Adonis DNA,” and “winning.”
“I was so jacked on the Krazy Kreme, those phrases went into my brain and stayed on a loop just below the surface,” Sheen writes. “They were patient with one eye on the door, waiting for the right customer to show up, be seated, and casually ask about the specials.”
