Harry Potter star Tom Felton details substance abuse struggles and his escape from rehab in memoir
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Tom Felton opened up about his past struggles with addiction in his memoir.
The Harry Potter star revealed that throughout much of his 20s, he began "drinking to escape" and spent a lot of time at dive bars in Los Angeles, noting that the troubles often spilled into his professional life.
"Drinking becomes a habit at the best of times," Felton writes in Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard. "When you're drinking to escape a situation, even more so. The habit spilled out of the bar and, from time to time, on to set."
Felton continues, "It came to the point where I would think nothing of having a drink while I was working. I'd turn up unprepared, not the professional I wanted to be. The alcohol, though, wasn't the problem. It was the symptom."
Mike Marsland/Getty Images 'Harry Potter' star Tom Felton details substance abuse struggles and his escape from rehab in memoir
It all came to a head when Felton's agents, managers, lawyer, and former girlfriend Jade Olivia staged an intervention and a made a plan to send him to rehab. "Everybody in the room had written me a letter," he recalled. "I listened to Jade and the others as they told me how concerned they were about my behaviour, about my drinking and my substance abuse. I was in no state to hear them."
One letter, however, "hit the hardest." It came courtesy of his lawyer, the one person in the room he "knew the least." Felton recalled, "My lawyer, whom I'd barely ever met face to face, spoke with quiet honesty. 'Tom,' he said, 'I don't know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I've been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don't be the twelfth.'"
His words "cut through" Felton's anger and denial. The road to recovery was rocky. Felton entered a rehab facility in Malibu, where the nurses asked if he preferred to use an alias on his name badge given his Harry Potter stardom. "If people recognize me from the Harry Potter films it'll be because of my face," Felton replied. "You could write 'Mickey Fucking Mouse' on my chest and they're not going to think I'm him."
Grand Central Publishing 'Beyond the Wand' by Tom Felton
The actor also recounted escaping the facility less than 24 hours after checking in, towards the Pacific Coast Highway. Later, "All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me," Felton wrote. "I was, I realise now, completely sober for the first time in ages, and I had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger. I started screaming at God, at the sky, at everyone and no one, full of fury for what had happened to me, for the situation in which I found myself. I yelled, full-lung, at the sky and the ocean. I yelled until I'd let it all out, and I couldn't yell any more."
Some time later, Felton entered another rehab facility, but was kicked out after being found in a woman's room. Another stint in rehab helped him get back on track. "I am not alone in having these feelings," he wrote. "Just as we all experience physical ill-health at some stage in our lives, so we all experience mental ill-health too. There's no shame in that. It's not a sign of weakness. And part of the reason that I took the decision to write these pages is the hope that by sharing my experiences, I might be able to help someone else who is struggling."
"I'm no longer shy of putting my hands up and saying: I'm not okay," he continued. "To this day I never know which version of myself I'm going to wake up to. Which takes us back to the concept of rehab, and the stigma attached to the word. By no means do I want to casualise the idea of therapy—it's a difficult first step to take—but I do want to do my bit to normalise it. I think we all need it in one shape or another, so why wouldn't it be normal to talk openly about how we're feeling?"
Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard is available where books are sold now.
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