Charlie Sheen Is Trying to Make Up for Lost Time in His Doc

Once upon a time, a Charlie Sheen meltdown could control a whole news cycle: He’d freak out, he’d do a tell-all interview even more chaotic than whatever freak-out he’d had, there’d be lawsuits, and his father, Martin Sheen, would quietly try to help his son maintain dignity in the face of endless press baiting and hounding. While this happened several times throughout Charlie’s career, it occurred most recently and notably in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when his severe drug addiction and erratic behavior led to his being fired from Two and a Half Men and embarking on his nationwide “My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option” tour.

The Charlie of those decades is not the Sheen we see front and center in Andrew Renzi’s two-part Netflix documentary, aka Charlie Sheen. Now eight years sober, Sheen is still brash, uncouth, and frustratingly charming, but he seems to have finally reckoned with his path of destruction. The three-hour-long doc is complete with commentary from his co-star Jon Cryer, two ex-wives, one brother, two children, and Sean Penn. Because Sheen’s mess has been public for so long, it could feel as though we’ve seen this all before, but aka Charlie Sheen goes deep and is a fun companion piece to his memoir, The Book of Sheen, also out this week. In both, Sheen muses on the lasting ramifications of his decades of drug abuse — and how he’s trying to make up for lost time. Here are the eight biggest takeaways.

He vehemently denies allegations about assaulting Corey Haim and knowingly passing along HIV to sexual partners.

Toward the end of the second part of aka Charlie Sheen, Sheen goes on the record about things he’s never discussed publicly, including Corey Feldman accusing the actor of sexually assaulting Corey Haim on the set of Lucas in 1986. “It’s a piece of vile fiction,” Sheen says. He also addresses the lawsuits wherein he was accused of knowingly transmitting HIV to his sexual partners. “There’s only one person in the entire fucking mix who has this thing,” he says, referring to HIV. He points to himself and adds, “And that’s this guy.”

He almost had the lead part in The Karate Kid.

“This would have been a star-turning moment,” Sheen explains, but he had already signed onto Grizzly II: Revenge, a campy horror sequel to the 1976 film Grizzly. Though the film he agreed to do also starred Laura Dern and George Clooney, Sheen could feel that The Karate Kid was a better opportunity. When he took the dilemma to his father, Martin told him he had to stick with his word and go ahead with Grizzly II. “Your word in this business is going to carry you further than one big movie,” Martin said at the time. Charlie wasn’t happy, though he stuck with Grizzly II despite feeling “terribly misled.”

Heidi Fleiss says she never would have outed Sheen to the public.

When being indicted for pandering, the infamous Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss purportedly had a list of celebrity clients, including Sheen. His name went public because he paid for services in signed traveler’s checks, allowing police and investigators access to his identity. The U.S. Attorney allegedly told Charlie that he would be granted immunity if he testified against Fleiss. “I didn’t want to be a rat, but there was no other way out of it,” Sheen maintains. Fleiss put it another way: “He’s a crybaby rich boy. They’re not gonna do shit to him. He’s Charlie Sheen.”

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Jon Cryer compares Charlie Sheen to Kim Jong-il.

CBS presold a few seasons of the hit sitcom Two and a Half Men in a way that made it tricky for Sheen to pull out of his role when he started using drugs. Les Moonves, the network’s CEO, went to Sheen’s home to advocate for his return to the show, even as he was crashing out. Sheen felt like he was done, but he was able to negotiate his contract up to a whopping $2 million per episode. “The dictator of North Korea was a guy named Kim Jong-il. He acted crazy all the time and thus got enormous amounts of aid from countries who were so scared of him,” Cryer says. “That’s what happened here.”

Denise Richards stood by him even once they were separated.

Charlie’s ex-wife Richards tells a story about being asked to check on the actor in the aftermath of their separation. She brought sandwich ingredients over, and Cryer watched her make sandwiches not only for Sheen, but for the sex workers who were at his place. “I’m trying to help — get — well, keep him good,” Richards says of her mission during that time. Of all the people from Sheen’s past who weigh in on their time with him, she seems both the most grounded and most agonized. In the final shot of her in the documentary, she wipes away tears: Whatever pain she experienced with him still resonates, even though she supports him from afar.

Martin Sheen gave an abrupt speech at his son’s third wedding.

Not long after Richards and Sheen separated, he started dating actress Brooke Mueller. Jon Cryer recalls his wife going to Sheen’s wedding in his stead and recalling Martin’s brief words of encouragement: “I hope you know what you two are doing.”

Sheen credits his drug dealer for helping him get sober.

How exactly did Sheen get sober after all these attempts at rehab and lifestyle changes? His drug dealer and friend Marco gets credit. As Sheen’s addiction and behavior got worse in the early 2010s, it became clear that nothing was going to stop him from going down this path. “His drug counselor at the time told me, ‘Is there any way you can make it less potent?’” Marco recounts. He then started to incrementally decrease the amount of cocaine in the crack he made, giving Sheen weaker and weaker drugs. It took about 18 months, but Charlie eventually got tired of smoking “bunt crack” that he thought was “good crack.” “There’s supporting players that are more important in the story than myself,” Sheen concludes — and Marco is certainly one of them.

Sean Penn has seemingly been smoking cigarettes for four months straight.

Childhood friend and loyal companion Penn speaks to Sheen’s wayward creativity as a teen and their overlap as young heartthrobs in the ’80s, but every time he appears in a talking head, Penn is clutching a cig. This might be unremarkable in and of itself, but it’s the third time in recent cultural memory that Penn has brought his security cigarette with him: Just earlier this week, he appeared with one in a New York Times photo shoot, and he went through at least four cigarettes on the season finale of John Mulaney’s Everybody’s Live.