If the only new revelation and insight from a glossy documentary series of more than 3 hours is that the subject used to have sex with men under the influence of crack cocaine, and that too when the subject is someone as colorful and problematic as Charlie Sheen, there is simply no reason for such work to exist. Yet, Netflix’s latest celebrity docuseries, AKA Charlie Sheen, exists despite bringing nothing interesting or new to the table apart from the aforementioned fact about Sheen getting intimate with men as well, which the whole world had already guessed by now. Although AKA Charlie Sheen tries faintly to get into the divisive figure’s personal and professional life, it mostly idolizes him indirectly by glossing over the more difficult questions and ultimately becomes an uninteresting and useless watch.
Spoiler Alert
How did Charlie Sheen excel in his acting career?
According to Charlie Sheen himself, who appears throughout AKA Charlie Sheen in an extensive interview, he was born ‘dead’ on the 3rd of September, 1965, meaning that he was not breathing at the time of his birth because his face was completely wrapped by his mother’s umbilical cord. The baby had to be beaten by the doctors with considerable force for it to start breathing again and cry out in pain. As the youngest son of Hollywood actor Martin Sheen, Charlie had a keen interest in cinema from a very early age, along with his elder brothers Ramon and Emilio. The kids were given Super 8 cameras when they were young boys, and their playtime immediately circled around writing and shooting skits by themselves, with Charlie’s friend from the neighborhood, Sean Penn, also soon becoming a part of the elaborate pastime. When he was just 14, Charlie had the first real experience of a movie set and film shoot when the entire family moved to the Philippines during the shooting of Francis Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”
This experience immensely affected Charlie and his brothers, as they quickly started to incorporate a lot more violence, gunplay, and fake bloodshedin their skits and home movies. During the shoot, Martin had also gone through some serious troubles with alcoholism, and this affected his sons as well. Never interested in education and somehow managing to get into college, Charlie just could not attend classes because of how boring he found them to be, and he admits to having started drinking from his very teenage years. By this time, he had already seen his elder brother, Emilio Estevez, enter the movie business under his original family name and get quite a bit of popularity as an actor. The attention, money, and fame were all too lucrative for Charlie, as he admittedly grew jealous of his brother and wanted to follow in his footsteps. As he dropped out of college and was forced to go to work by his father, Charlie decided to audition for films, taking on the screen name of Charlie Sheen to replace his original name, Charlie Estevez.
Apparently, he succeeded in his very first audition and was selected for the B-grade horror film “Grizzly II: The Predator.” Although he had been asked to audition and learn karate for “The Karate Kid,” Charlie had already made a commitment with a different studio, and his father insisted that he keep his word. Over the next few years, he continued to star in a number of films, in all sorts of roles, before securing his first major role in the 1986 war drama, “Platoon.” The film went on to win the best picture at the Academy Awards that year, and this largely boosted Charlie Sheen’s confidence and also his reception as a new actor in Hollywood. He then featured in many more movies and was given his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994. Charlie had an avid interest in sitcoms for quite some time, as he himself loved watching these shows, and so he agreed to make guest appearances in all the sitcoms that approached him, and he soon appeared in “Spin City.” In 2003, CBS seemingly built a whole sitcom around his controversial figure, called “Two and a Half Men,” which went on to give Charlie Sheen even more popularity and exposure.
How did Sheen become the subject of multiple scandals?
But along with the professional success came the absolute mess that his personal life was turning into, totally because of his alcohol and drug addiction and also his inability to draw the line when it came to morals and ethics. For quite a long time, Charlie had openly admitted that he was in the habit of paying sex workers to get intimate with him, and he also revealed that his very first experience, as a 15-year-old kid, had come in a similar manner. His habit of drinking and partying had gotten so out of hand that his family had tried to get him into rehab a number of times. In 1995, Charlie made it to mainstream news in a significant manner for the wrong reasons for the first time, when he was found to be a regular client of Heidi Fleiss, a woman who ran an upscale prostitution ring in Los Angeles. Not only was he publicly shamed, but Charlie was also made to face the law, as Fleiss’ business was completely illegal.
In “AKA Charlie Sheen,” the actor states that he did not have much understanding of the laws at the time, and he apparently did not know that he could pay sex workers for his friends’ sake, which seemed to be a loophole to the investigators at the time. Therefore, he had to appear in court, and he actually testified against Heidi Fleiss, which led to the woman being sentenced to prison. Fleiss, who appears in the docuseries, hates Sheen to this day for what he had done to her and claims that she had no intention to reveal his name in the first place. It was only because he had foolishly used travelers’ checks to make payments to her, instead of cash, which was the more commonly used form, that his name was found by the investigators, and her empire had come crashing down.
This was unfortunately not the last public scandal that Charlie would be involved in, as his drinking and substance abuse led to numerous more such instances, in which he fled from rehab, was arrested by the police on several occasions, and even crashed his car twice, quickly turning from a recognized actor to a persona regularly featured in tabloids and cheap gossip magazines. He also had a falling out with the “Two and a Half Men” creator, Chuck Lorre, after he had been dropped from the show because of his severely problematic behavior and public scandals. Charlie also then appeared on TV and the internet numerous times to make outrageous claims about himself and his superiority over mere humans, clearly under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
In this regard, AKA Charlie Sheen clearly avoids a lot of the more serious matters, or chooses to show them quite lightly and casually, that definitely deserved a more probing look. When Charlie publicly acknowledged in 2015 that he was HIV-positive, a number of his ex-girlfriends sued him for hiding the matter from them before he got intimate with them. Although it is very likely that the actor did not know of his STD at the time, he still cannot avoid taking responsibility for his actions, which he eventually did by settling the lawsuits monetarily. In 2020, actor Corey Feldman revealed that Charlie Sheen had sexually assaulted his 13-year-old costar Corey Haim on the set of “Lucas” back in 1986. As this matter is raised in the docuseries, Sheen outright denies it and claims it to have been just a false allegation against his name. While this is possible as well, it feels difficult to believe, as only his side is reported, and that too by a docuseries that seems to be aimed at simply portraying a glorified picture of the actor’s reemergence after all the public troubles. There are also reports of Sheen allegedly keeping an unhealthy interest in underage boys and girls, but all of that is totally avoided by the series.
How was the actor’s romantic life affected due to drug abuse?
Charlie Sheen’s romantic life had turned into an utter mess very soon after he started losing control over his sexual and drug-related urges, and his first child was born when he was merely a young adult. He was engaged to actor Kelly Preston, but the relationship broke very soon after she was hit by bullet shrapnel at his house, apparently by accident. He then married model Donna Peele in 1995, but their romance fizzled out in just a few months, and the couple separated some time after Charlie was named in the list of Heidi Fleiss’ clients that very same year. Actress Denise Richards, who appears in the docuseries, became his 2nd wife in 2002, but she too found it extremely difficult to be with a man who had no sense of control or ability to fight his addictions.
Despite still being in love with the man, as she herself claims in the Netflix presentation, Richards could not live up to the ill-disciplined life of Charlie, and she divorced him in 2006, mostly because of his alcohol addiction. Very soon after his divorce, actress Brooke Mueller entered his life, and the two instantly connected, as she too had been fighting to stay away from drugs. The couple married in 2008, but they both returned to their old habits, this time together, which made the situation far worse. They divorced in 2011, following which Charlie Sheen dated a number of adult film stars, sometimes even living with multiple women at the same time. None of these relationships lasted, though, as he kept losing grip over his life and ultimately any chance of a romantic life. For most of his life, he remained distant from the lives of his children as well, before making amends eventually.
Why did Sheen repeatedly fail to change his ways?
For a very brief duration, AKA Charlie Sheen delves into the deeper question of why Charlie Sheen could never really stop himself from getting affected by his drug addiction. The most obvious suggestion is that Charlie had experienced success in his professional field at a relatively young age, which made him feel invincible with regard to being persecuted by the law. There were numerous incidents as well in which he had managed to slither past any legal trouble only because he was a recognized actor. He admits that he often got lucky because police personnel identified him and let him off, and combined with this was the habit of drinking that he had already developed at a very young age. Charlie had also witnessed his father’s alcohol-fueled breakdown, and he was seemingly affected by this as well.
However, all these claims, or maybe the way in which they are presented in the docuseries, do appear like half-hearted statements behind which Charlie Sheen still wants to hide his real decadent and impulsive nature. His “Two and a Half Men” costar, Jon Cryer, probably has a better answer to the question of why Charlie could never change his ways and get away from drugs. According to Cryer, Charlie Sheen has a deep sense of self-doubt in his mind, which often makes him wonder whether he deserves all the success he has gotten. As a result, he would let himself lose control over his life and sort of punish himself for being in a position that he does not deserve to be in, to then once again stop his ill habits temporarily and reform his life for a short while. There must be further, more serious complications in the actor’s mind if he is indeed afflicted by any mental illnesses. But on multiple occasions, Charlie Sheen’s actions have really made him seem like just a spoiled brat with hardly any respect for people around him, especially women, and AKA Charlie Sheen does little to change this opinion.
It must also be mentioned that a lot of Sheen’s drug-fueled actions, especially post 2010, were also facilitated by the strange and confusing public reception that he got, as he was perceived as a sort of cult hero who did not care about anything in the world. As with anything on the internet, his way of life resonated with some people, who became his fans, and his popularity only kept growing. It all transpired into such a situation that people on the internet actually waited for the next big Charlie Sheen scandal, and he was even made a part of a reality series, which entailed the actor traveling the world in a drunk and drugged state, always on the verge of creating more trouble. Had his tirades not gotten such attention, Sheen could have arguably done things differently.
Where is Charlie Sheen now?
In the final part of AKA Charlie Sheen, Charlie’s final struggle to keep away from drugs and alcohol is given very little focus, and we actually don’t know how he achieved the commendable feat of being sober for eight straight years. Currently, Charlie has reconciled his relationship with his earlier estranged children, and he lives in Los Angeles with his youngest son, Bob, who is an aspiring musician and filmmaker. His daughter, Lola, who remembers being sad about the absence of her father during her childhood, is now happy that he is finally back in her life in a substantial way. The actor also keeps in touch with his ex-wives, Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, and has good terms with them despite their respective relationships having failed. However, with someone like Charlie Sheen, it is difficult to know whether he is even telling the truth and for how long the good times will last, and shows like AKA Charlie Sheen only reinstate that doubt, sadly.
