Charlie Sheen: Guns n' Neuroses

Q: Your second film, Red Dawn, brought you in contact with director John Milius. Did he give you any helpful advice?

A: I had this very emotional scene after I had just witnessed the assassination of this whole group, and right before the take Milius came up to me. I was expecting some very philosophical advice. He says, "Listen, I didn't hire any pussies on this movie. I know you're not a pussy, so get out there and kick ass."

Q: Milius is a gun enthusiast. Did any of his gung-ho behavior rub off on you?

A: He was one of the influences who sparked my interest in guns. When the crew was setting up a shot you'd always hear gunfire somewhere and it was John, off with his latest weapon, capping off rounds. I thought that was kind of cool.

Q: You've been outspoken about your right to bear arms. How old were you when you got your first gun?

A: Eighteen. I love to shoot. I don't hunt, I don't kill animals, I don't believe in it. If I need food or meat I go to the market.

Q: But you are of the belief that guns don't kill people, people do?

A: I tend to believe that. I'm also aware that the weapon was invented to kill people. That's the bottom line. And I think the laws should be a little stricter, especially with handguns.

Q: Is your father against guns?

A: Completely.

Q: Do you argue about it with him?

A: Oh, yeah. But I just say, "Man, the right to bear arms, it's right in the Constitution."

Q: How did you earn the nickname "The Shotgun Kid"?

A: I lived at this beach house and I had this semi-automatic .12 gauge with an eight shot capacity and at two or three in the morning, I would load it up and stand on the balcony and just unload double 00 buck into the ocean. One of my neighbors formed a search party to see where all this gunfire was coming from, and they found the spent casings on the beach in front of my house. He called me "The Shotgun Kid" and that kind of stuck.

Q: So where do you shoot now?

A: I take my boat out and shoot off the boat. You can go four miles out and it's legal.

Q: You and your former girlfriend Kelly Preston were involved in a shooting incident not too long ago. What happened?

A: With the continual threat of crazy people towards celebrities, I've been carrying a weapon for quite some time. Even if I was taken out, I'd want to take the sonofabitch with me. So I used to carry a little revolver in my back pocket where it lived. I was downstairs one morning and Kelly was upstairs. She went to move my pants, the gun fell out of the back pocket, hit the linoleum floor and discharged a round that, thank God, didn't hit her directly. It hit the toilet that she was standing next to. She got hit with the porcelain shrapnel, and lead from the bullet itself. I heard the shot and rushed upstairs. There was Kelly in her underwear, holding her wrist and bleeding from several places. She was taken to the hospital and then released the same day with four stitches, two in her wrist and two in her calf. I took that particular weapon and threw it in the ocean because it had a vibe about it that was not healthy. Kelly agreed with me about that.

Q: When you were 19 you fathered a child with your high school girlfriend Paula. Did you want her to have the baby?

A: I wasn't highly in favor of it at the time. But it hasn't proven to be a disastrous situation. The child, Cassandra, is beautiful. Paula is marrying a guy that puts in car stereos. He's great with Cassandra.

Q: How often do you see your daughter?

A: Not as much as I should. Every other weekend or so. It's a pretty groovy situation, it could be a lot worse.

Q: After Paula and before Kelly you had a girlfriend, Dolly Fox, who came to visit you in the Philippines while you were making Platoon. She said you had a really ugly breakup. What happened with her?

A: I have this awful history of getting involved with women that seem to have it all together when we hook up, and then as the months progress their lives just kind of fall apart and crumble before me, and I'm left holding the bag.

Q: Nothing to do with you, of course...

A: I could be the problem. Dolly found out I was involved in some highly dubious activity with other women. She drank a bottle of Cuervo one night in front of my eyes. I was very impressed at the consumption level until she became the devil and single-handedly destroyed the kitchen and the living room in a blind tequila rage. I just said, "That's it, this cannot continue." Just broke it off. It's funny, this stuff seems so long ago, but it's only a few years ago.

Q: Does your womanizing and the revelation of your little black book in People magazine also seem long ago?

A: It wasn't a book, it was a napkin. Just sort of some creative references to remind me of who was who, because I was oftentimes very, very drunk when I would meet these women, so you've got to give yourself like a little legend, a map.

Q: And you showed this to People?

A: I showed it to them. I don't know what I was thinking.

Q: What's the worst thing that's been written about you?

A: The worst thing was when I was in Virginia Beach for SEALS and Kelly, very disturbed, called me. There was piece in the Star that I had been secretly dating a porn star named Victoria Paris behind Kelly's back. I've never even seen this lady in a movie! The best line in there was, "She orders strawberry shakes with whipped cream and Charlie sits and watches while she drinks them." I got a lawyer and two weeks later there was a big retraction. But the Star and the Enquirer are just losers, man. I have no time for their bullshit. They are maggots and fucking queens. They are eunuchs at an orgy. They're as low as low gets.

Q: Moving from lows to highs, Platoon was the picture that changed your life. Yet when it was offered, your father advised against doing it, didn't he?

A: He didn't want me to have to go through it. A lot of it had to do with going back to the Philippines, which was weird, because I was going back ten years later to do my own version of what he did in Apocalypse Now.

Q: Before you got the part, didn't you almost lose it when someone told Oliver Stone that you had a drinking problem, which was in evidence during The Wraith, the film you had worked on before Platoon?

A: Yeah. There was this motherfucker who worked for the movie company who saw some of the rushes where I was tired and I couldn't get anything right, and he called Oliver and said, "You don't want this guy. He's a druggie, he's an alcoholic, a homosexual..." Whatever he said. And I caught wind of this and I took a baseball bat and destroyed my hotel room, about $3100 worth of damages. It was do the hotel room or do this guy, and I didn't want to go to jail because I probably would have killed him. He didn't have the decency to come to me and talk about what he thought was my problem. He had to go over my head and fuck with my livelihood. That's not cool. That's about as uncool as it gets.

Q: What was Stone's response?

A: Oliver called me and said, "Listen, I'm hearing things but it's not going to sway me, we've got to talk when you get back to L.A." And when we talked he said, "We've got to make a deal. You can't be drinking on my show." I said, "Just let me have one wrap beer a day." After the first two or three weeks, Oliver forgot about this whole deal.

Q: And did Stone contribute to your tension by demanding more from you than you wanted to give? Making you take your shirt off when you preferred to keep it on?

A: That's true. I got a tattoo and wanted to hide it because it wasn't right for the character.

Q: What kind of tattoo?

A: It's an Oriental dragon's head. I got it after a Dodger game when I was 18, at Hollywood and Vine. Anyway, for a scene in Platoon, we were unloading a chopper and it was kicking up a lot of shit. I said, "Let me wear this shirt to protect myself and it will hide the tattoo." And Stone said, "What are you, a fucking pussy from Malibu?" I said, "Fuck you. Who the fuck are you?" I took the shirt off and we did it. But it was then I became hep to his button-pushing games. He gets what he needs out of his actors.

Q: You got something else out of Platoon as well--a nicotine addiction. Did you smoke before that?

A: No. Actually, Johnny Depp, an old buddy of mine, had a serious influence on my taking up that habit. His claim was that on every film he's worked on, he has converted a non-smoker to a smoker, and I was his victim. But I'm cutting back, I'm smoking about a pack and a half of lights these days.

Q: Are you also cutting back on your drinking?

A: As far as drinking and working, I haven't had a problem with that. Well, there were a couple of times, but it didn't seem to make any sense because I lost the edge. When I get on the set I feel like I've got the edge, and alcohol or drugs make it tough to maintain that.

Q: Still, after Platoon, fame let you see life differently.

A: It got a little bit nuts. Suddenly, after sitting for three years alongside my brother, my friends Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, and Tom Cruise, just watching all the attention they got and the women that went with it - it's like something you yearn for, pray for. So, you know, I was really trying to seize the moment for everything it was worth. When, in fact, it was worthless. But it took a while - I had a problem with never wanting the party to end. Finally, the people around me just kind of went, "Hey dude, the party's over."

Q: When did you find that out?

A: I was 202, right in the middle of Wall Street. I showed up on the set one day for a big scene with Michael Douglas. I was so hungover that during the rehearsal I couldn't take my shades off. Just sipped water to keep from vomiting on Michael. Luckily, I realized, "Man, this is not working at all." I was in a position that millions of people would love to occupy and who would show up sober and give it their darnedest and I wasn't. It dawned on me that I needed to clean up my fucking act and start taking this shit a little more seriously. It was a heavy time of growth. I look back now and see that I went into three co-starring bit parts after Wall Street and they were awful career moves. Maybe I was afraid of what would happen, with how successful I could have become.

Q: What other fears do you have?

A: I used to have a tremendous fear of dying. I figure it's got to be the heaviest trip, they save it for last. I used to worry about dying in a shoot-out with the cops. I have a thing about not wanting to die in a car crash. That would really suck. Then there are the fears I came on later in life - the fears of failure, of acceptance and credibility, of never being anything more than someone's son.

Q: Your father once said that his children are his destiny, that "We pick our parents and children before birth. It's not an accident, our children come to us to make up for past life indiscretions." Does that sound like him?

A: Word for word. Wow. We should probably take a moment of silence on that one. Goddamn, that's pretty heavy. If that's true I hope his destiny has not betrayed him in the form of us. I don't know what else to say about that, really.

Q: The public's perception of you, which you've basically confirmed here, is of a pretty angry young man who is beginning to come to grips with himself. How would you like to be perceived?

A: As a guy who has a tremendous love for life and is associated with doing good work. I'm a guy who suddenly woke up one day and had the world handed to him and did a little exploring and made some mistakes. And it's like everybody think that's such a fucking crime. But I wasn't' out selling crack or knocking off liquor stores. There are a lot of people who would have gone down the same road I did. I was just lucky that I was able to get out of it.

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Lawrence Grobel is the author of The Hustons. He wrote Movieline's April cover interview with Jamie Lee Curtis.

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