Five years on from her very public breakdown, former teen star Amanda Bynes has addressed her struggles with drug abuse and announced her intention to return to acting, having announced her ‘retirement’ from the business on Twitter in 2013.
Appearing in a cover shoot for Paper magazine, the actress, who found fame in the early Noughties with her Nickelodeon show and then appeared in teen comedies like What a Girl Wants and She’s The Man before starring in Hairspray and Easy A, revealed how her drug use caught up with her, starting with marijuana before abusing the prescription drug Adderall.
‘I started smoking marijuana when I was 16,’ she told Paper. ‘Even though everyone thought I was the “good girl,” I did smoke marijuana from that point on.’ She then moved on to other recreational drugs before seeking out Adderall.
When she was filming Hairspray, she recalls ‘reading an article in a magazine that [called Adderall] “the new skinny pill” and they were talking about how women were taking it to stay thin. I was like, “Well, I have to get my hands on that.”’ She adds that she was able to obtain the drug, use of which was then widespread among teenagers and college students, by going ‘to a psychiatrist and faking the symptoms of ADD.’
She recalls how use of the drug not only impacted upon her ability to learn lines on the set of Hall Pass, a film which she eventually dropped out of, but its distorting impact on her body image, remembering ‘seeing [her] image on the screen and literally tripping out and thinking my arm looked so fat […] I remember rushing off set and thinking, “Oh my god, I look so bad.”’
When attending a screening of another film, Easy A, in which she starred with Emma Stone, she remembers ‘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,’ she explains. ‘I don’t know if it was drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way that it affects other people. I absolutely changed my perception of things.’
It was at that point that Amanda decided to announce her ‘retirement’ from the industry in a series of tweets, which would become progressively more bizarre and inflammatory. The actress recalls how the tweets were prompted by a step-up in her drug use, explaining ‘it became a really dark, sad world for me […] stuck at home, getting high, watching TV and tweeting.’
The actress reveals that she was been sober for nearly four years, and credits her parents with ‘helping [her] get back on track.’ Now, she’s studying merchandise product development at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles and is planning a return to acting on her own terms. She wants, she says, to re-enter the industry ‘kind of the same way [she] did as a kid, which is with excitement and hope for the best.’