'Terminator' star Nick Stahl opens up about past alcohol addiction: 'I never had a brake pedal with it'
Former child star Nick Stahl is revealing the depths of his decades-long battle with alcoholism and how the addiction upended his entire life.
Stahl, who rose to fame in the 2000s with roles in the Oscar-nominated film "In the Bedroom," HBO's "Carnivàle" and "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," is opening up about how his alcohol addiction was present throughout much of his early career.
In an interview published Thursday, Stahl, 45, told The Hollywood Reporter that he "was pretty much hungover for every single day of work that I ever did."
"As a kid, in my early 20s, through all the films, through 'In the Bedroom,' through 'Terminator,' through 'Carnivàle,' through all of it," he said. "I didn’t really discriminate – I’d use anything to change the way I felt when I was sober."
Stahl said the socioeconomic instability of his childhood – his mother struggled to make ends meet working as a brokerage assistant and children's theater seamstress – contributed to the foundation of his addiction. He was 13 when he first tried alcohol, he said.
"There was this idea that if we didn’t come up with enough money for that month, we would end up on the street," Stahl told the outlet. "That colored my outlook growing up. My default mode was untrusting, with this mentality of waiting for the other shoe to drop."
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Stahl said he found solace from his inner demons in acting. "I was always playing moodier characters," he said, "which was how I was feeling."
"I don't look back on my childhood with real fond memories, but for some reason, when I did plays, that stuff shut off and I had this ability to just be very comfortable," Stahl added.
By age 11, Stahl was already being approached by Hollywood figures like Mel Gibson, who invited him to Los Angeles for a lunch meeting. It resulted in Stahl landing a role in Gibson's 1993 drama, "The Man Without a Face."
As a teenager, the fast-paced Hollywood scene enabled Stahl's addiction: "They were always opening new spots in Hollywood: bars, hotels, clubs. They weren't exactly checking my ID, and because I had done a couple movies, it was very easy access."
"It's a horrible cliché child-actor story, but I had a very unusual relationship to drugs and alcohol," Stahl told THR. "I never had a brake pedal with it."
At the height of his addiction, following two failed rehab stints in 2007 and 2009, Stahl found himself "arrested several times on charges including possession of meth and disorderly conduct," according to THR.
After deciding to step away from acting in 2012, Stahl told THR he settled in Dallas, Texas, to focus on his recovery. Now four years sober and with several new acting gigs under his belt, Stahl said sobriety gave his life a reset.
"It proved to be reconstructive for me," Stahl said. "That’s when I really started to piece together that I had neglected building a real life outside of the business. For many years, I had everything, but I didn’t have anything resembling a satisfying life.
"I didn’t have outside interests. I lost touch with friends and family. The film world made up too much of my identity."
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Stahl isn’t the only star who’s opened up about past struggles with drug addiction. In her 2020 memoir “Open Book,” singer Jessica Simpson revealed the trauma of childhood sexual abuse, along with career stress, led to an alcohol and drug dependency.
"I was killing myself with all the drinking and pills," she wrote, adding she's been sober since November 2017 and that therapy helped her heal. "Giving up the alcohol was easy. I was mad at that bottle, at how it allowed me to stay complacent and numb."
Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx has also been candid about his drug addictions, which were portrayed in Netflix’s "The Dirt," a Motley Crue biopic that charts the band's meteoric rise to fame in the 1980s.
"I was doing a little over $1,000 a day in heroin, and then probably the same in cocaine and alcohol," Sixx said. "I was in a downward spiral and was eventually going to end up dead or bankrupt.”
The effects of alcohol abuse
Alcohol is the most frequently used and misused substance in the U.S., according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. And excessive alcohol kills more than 95,000 people in the U.S. each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Alcohol abuse may also be exacerbated by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. As people deal with job anxiety or prolonged isolation amid the pandemic, alcohol sales spiked nationwide. In an April survey, nearly 1 in 5 Americans reported consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol, USA TODAY reported.
"This notion persists that addicts and alcoholics have a choice, which is silly, because addiction by definition is someone doing something they can’t stop doing," Stahl told THR. "Addicts are treated as if, on some level, maybe they don’t care enough: Maybe they’re morally dysfunctional or defective. And those things are absolutely not true.
"Alcoholics lose their relationships, their family members, their money. They end up in terrible situations. If someone could choose to change that, who wouldn’t?"
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Contributing: Charles Trepany, Patrick Ryan, Alia E. Dastagir, Janet Loehrke
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Terminator' actor Nick Stahl on struggles with alcoholism, addiction
