Amanda Bynes has opened up about suffering a public meltdown, after almost four years sober.
The 32-year-old is the star of PAPER magazine’s annual ‘Break the Internet’ issue, and Amanda got candid in her cover interview.
During her chat, the actress opened up about landing her own show on Nickelodeon, before she eventually transitioned into movies, starring in blockbuster hits like Big Fat Liar and What a Girl Wants.
Then, Amanda landed a huge role in 2006’s She’s the Man, in which she starred alongside Channing Tatum.
In the movie, Amanda’s character dresses up as a boy, which she has since described as a “super strange and out-of-body experience”.
She explained, “When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy. I’ve never told anyone that.”
Then when she was cast in 2007’s Hairspray, the actress started taking Adderall after reading that it was the “new skinny pill”.
Amanda visited a psychiatrist and faked the symptoms of ADD in order to get a prescription.
She confessed, “They were talking about how women were taking it to stay thin. I was like, ‘Well, I have to get my hands on that.'”
“When I was doing Hall Pass, I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [higher that way].
“I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines. Or memorize them, for that matter,” she continued.
After quitting Hall Pass, Amanda starred in Easy A alongside Emma Stone.
She explained, “I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.”
“I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me. I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things.”
After Easy A, Amanda announced her retirement on Twitter at the age of 24.
“If I was going to retire [the right way], I should’ve done it in a press statement—but I did it on Twitter,” she admitted. “Real classy!”
After she retired from acting, Amanda started “hanging out with a seedier crowd”.
“I had a lot of time on my hands and I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long. I got really into my drug usage, and it became a really dark, sad world for me.”
During this time, Amanda started tweeting pretty outlandish things – and took aim at plenty of famous faces, including Rihanna and Drake.
Looking back, Amanda confessed, “I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would. And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me.
“It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad,” she said. “Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter…”
Amanda also hit back at those who claimed she had psychological issues, as she insisted that her shocking behaviour was completely “drug-induced”.
“It definitely isn’t fun when people diagnose you with what they think you are. That was always really bothersome to me. If you deny anything and tell them what it actually is, they don’t believe you,” she said.
“Truly, for me, [my behavior] was drug-induced, and whenever I got off of [drugs], I was always back to normal.”
“I know that my behavior was so strange that people were just trying to grasp at straws for what was wrong.”
Now “almost four years sober,” Amanda has thanked her parents for helping her get better, as she continues her education at L.A.’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.
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She concluded, “My advice to anyone who is struggling with substance abuse would be to be really careful because drugs can really take a hold of your life.”
“Everybody is different, obviously, but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain.
“It really made me a completely different person. I actually am a nice person. I would never feel, say or do any of the things that I did and said to the people I hurt on Twitter.”
“There are gateway drugs and thankfully I never did heroin or meth or anything like that but certain things that you think are harmless, they may actually affect you in a more harmful way. Be really, really careful because you could lose it all and ruin your entire life like I did.”
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“Those days of experimenting [with substances] are long over. I’m not sad about it and I don’t miss it because I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act.
“When I was off of them, I was completely back to normal and immediately realized what I had done — it was like an alien had literally invaded my body. That is such a strange feeling,” she added.
Read Amanda’s full interview with PAPER here.
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