Charlie Sheen was once a leading man in Hollywood. His new book reveals how it unraveled

Charlie Sheen discusses his book "The Book of Sheen" at the 92nd Street Y on Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

A young Charlie Sheen once had Hollywood in his pocket, starring in culture-shaping films like “Wall Street” and “Platoon” before eventually becoming the highest-paid actor in television.

But underneath the glory laid decades of drug abuse, seven worried family interventions, innumerable drug-fueled escapades and countless affairs. The actor’s tumultuous journey toward sobriety is unabashedly laid out in Sheen’s tell-all memoir, “The Book of Sheen.”

The 359-page book was released by Gallery Books Tuesday. It reveals the story behind Sheen’s rise, fall and eventual sobriety in 2017.

Here are some details about “Book of Sheen.”

What does Charlie Sheen’s book cover?

“The Book of Sheen” begins when Sheen’s life does, recounting his near-death experience during birth and meticulously narrates his wild journey through Hollywood, time he spent running from rehabilitation centers, partying with celebrities and three divorces.

Sheen was raised in a family full of actors. His father, Martin Sheen, found success in the ’70s, starring in the crime drama “Badlands” and “Apocalypse Now.”

He spent his childhood creating fiction films on a Super 8 film camera with his older brothers, Emilio and Ramon, he describes in the book.

“We were trying our best to mimic Dad’s profession: making the fake stuff seem real, while doing so fearlessly,” Sheen wrote.

How did Sheen become famous?

Sheen, 60, born as Carlos Irwin Estévez to Martin Sheen and Janet Templeton, was exposed to the acting world early, having grown up on his father’s film sets.

The budding actor eventually took on the stage name of Charlie Sheen, following his father, who made a similar change. He landed his first major acting role in the 1986 Vietnam War drama, “Platoon” and starred in the crime drama “Wall Street” alongside his father and Michael Douglas the following year.

The actor eventually found success in television, with a starring role in the popular CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men.” It made him the highest-paid male actor on television, reportedly earning US$1.8 million per episode during the show’s eighth season.

Sheen is widely known for his tumultuous professional and personal life. He spent the ’80s and ’90s addicted to alcohol and hard drugs, with explosive divorces, an HIV diagnosis and assault allegations dominating the tabloids.

“Two and a Half Men” was forced into a hiatus in 2011 when Sheen underwent his third rehab attempt. That season was eventually canceled and Sheen’s contract was terminated after he made offensive public statements toward creator Chuck Lorre.

Sheen maintained a relatively low public profile after his decision to become sober in late 2017.

Sheen’s early years of fame

As the child and brother of movie stars, Sheen has had famous friends and acquaintances for much of his life, from Sean Penn and Rob Lowe to George Clooney and Laura Dern.

By his mid-20s, he had partied with Madonna and Jack Nicholson — on the same night — played basketball with Michael Jordan, met Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and talked baseball with Reggie Jackson while both were guests at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.

“Platoon” made him a star and changed his life, no wish or desire left unmet.

He learned to live hard early on, drinking and snorting cocaine in high school and conceiving his first child at 18. Around the time he filmed “The Rookie,” which came out in 1990, loved ones staged the first of what he writes have been seven interventions. Among those urging him to clean up: Lowe, brother Emilio and father Martin, one of his junior high school teachers, a yoga master and the star and director of “The Rookie,” Clint Eastwood, who by telephone told him: “You got this, just a minor speed bump, go make me proud.”

Sheen ushered in the ’90s by assembling what he called The Jackson 5, a group of men that included Nicolas Cage. He describes in detail the drug-filled adventures they went on as they “tested the ceiling of stardom against the reach of the law.”

The Jackson 5 landed him in rehab for the first time and he left a new man, that is, until a chance encounter with a Foster’s Lager at Cage’s house exactly a year later, which is when he first broke his sobriety.

Sheen’s drug abuse

Sheen was first introduced to crack cocaine in 1992 by a girlfriend, an experience that he wrote “rewired my frontal cortex.” He knew then the drug could ruin his life, and vowed to never touch it again — a promise he kept until he began regularly using in 1996. He tried what he referred to as “dope” about a year after, given to him by a registered nurse he met at a party.

His drug use “comes down to choices … I didn’t wake up with a needle sticking out of my arm, I made the decision to put it there,” he wrote.

The drug use impacted his acting roles. Sheen was almost fired from the 1997 action comedy “Money Talks” after “a thirty-two-hour cocaine nosebleed” halted filming. His addiction to pills became too much to manage while on the set of “Two and Half Men,” as he describes being in “full withdrawal” by the middle of tapings.

Sheen cycled in and out of his sobriety for decades, including numerous rehab stays that he managed to escape almost every time.

In 1999, he celebrated his first year of sobriety while filming “Rated X.” But, he writes that he picked up crack cocaine, along with alcohol and prescription pills, once again while in a relationship with Brooke Mueller, who he married in 2008. Their subsequent split in 2011, coupled with the infamous “20/20″ interview he did that same year, which led to his firing from “Two and a Half Men,” pushed him further into his substance abuse.

After announcing his HIV diagnosis to the world on the “Today” show in 2015, Sheen quit hard drugs, he wrote, but the alcohol was harder to shake. The drinking, he thought at the time, was “a friend for life to help me navigate the potholes and landmines the future had in store.”

Ultimately, it was a car ride to an appointment for his daughter, Sam, who was 13 at the time, that sealed his long-term sobriety in December 2017. He had been drinking that morning and unable to drive. “There was only one thing that felt worse than betraying myself, and that was failing my children,” Sheen wrote.

Sheen and Heidi Fleiss

Half way through the book, Sheen describes first meeting Heidi Fleiss, most famously known as “The Hollywood Madam,” at a club in 1992. He described the intoxicating rush of hiring call girls, knowing there’s an “outside chance of opening the door to handcuffs instead of girls.”

Fleiss was later arrested in 1993, and Sheen, who’d written various checks to her in return for sexual encounters with women, “cut a deal for immunity.” In return, he provided a recorded testimony against Fleiss, who ultimately served 20 months at federal prison in California.

He describes in the book a sense of embarrassment for testifying against Fleiss, which was motivated by a fear of a pandering charge, which could’ve resulted in five years in jail. If he could go back, he wrote, “no chance I’d play ball like I did.”

Sheen’s marriages and divorces

“The Book of Sheen” describes in detail what led to Sheen’s three marriages and divorces.

Just before the Fleiss fallout, Sheen embarked on a whirlwind romance with Donna Peele, his first wife, which quickly turned sour soon after their marriage in 1995. He made a drunken spectacle at the wedding, got drunk during the flight home from the honeymoon — during which the pilot let him fly the plane for about 90 seconds — and threw their wedding rings out of a sunroof during an explosive fight. “I blame myself for most of our dustups, with booze being the easiest culprit to pin it on,” he wrote. “Our situation needed a villain to blame.”

Sheen met his second wife, Denise Richards, on a film set in the early 2000s and reconnected shortly after, when she guest starred on “Spin City.” The pair dated for about two months before he proposed, which he said was spurred by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his three-and-a-half year sobriety.

“For the first time in years,” he wrote, “my feelings were accessible and based in reality.” Right around the time Sheen was cast on “Two and a Half Men,” Richards had given birth to their daughter, Sam, and their home life was crumbling. Sheen turned to prescription pills and the two divorced shortly after their second daughter was born.

Sheen gave up pills for a while after his second divorce. He met Mueller shortly after, and the two got married a year later. He attributed the quickness to “feeling so overwhelmed, beat down, and outnumbered in my life.” The couple had twin boys in 2009 and he began using pills again shortly after that. Mueller, who was also sober when they met, began taking them as well, which eventually led to them both using hard drugs.

“The split from B left me numb, both in spirit and from the amount of booze and dope I showered my brain with to quell the debilitating frustrations,” Sheen wrote. Today, he described his relationship with Richards as “solid,” and with Mueller as “sustainable.”

What does Sheen say about the book?

The first line of his book had occurred to Sheen years before he actually sat down to write the memoir, he said during a conversation Monday with actor and writer David Duchovny during an event at 92nd Street Y, New York.

“On September 3rd, 1965 in New York City at 10:58 p.m. I was born dead,” the actor recited from memory on stage. That near-death experience right at birth, caused by an umbilical strangulation, set the tone for much of the rest of his life, Sheen said.

“People always say you got more lives than a cat, right, and they come in at nine or something,” Sheen said. “So I already got — We’re already at eight, right?”

The book was released eight years after he got sober, time that he said gave them the distance necessary to reflect on his life experiences.

“I needed this much distance between that other life, those other versions of me,” Sheen said. “I don’t think that I could’ve committed to this and delivered the type of focus and passion and discipline that it required unless I also had the distance.”

Itzel Luna, The Associated Press.

AP National Writer Hillel Italie contributed to this report.