Actors who got addicted to drugs as child stars as Hayden Panettiere reveals substance abuse

The life of a child star isn’t all glitz and glam and Hayden Panettiere proves that point once again as she has recently opened up about how that lifestyle lead her down a path of addiction to alcohol and opioids.

Panettiere, now 32, was already a big name in showbiz at 11-years-old after her role in Remember the Titans and various soap operas. 

By the time she was 15, the actress told People that someone on her team began giving her ‘happy pills’ so that she would be ‘peppy during interviews.’

‘I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction,’ she told the outlet.

By the time she was 16 years old, she was drinking and taking opioids regularly – whenever she wasn’t on set filming for Heroes. 

‘As I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn’t live without,’ she shared, revealing that her addiction got worse as she filmed Nashville and suffered from post-partum depression. 

She hit rock-bottom after filming for Nashville wrapped in 2018. She sent her seven-year-old daughter, Kaya, to live with her father, Wladimir Klitschhko, in Ukraine and was eventually hospitalized for jaundice and told my doctors that her ‘liver was going to give out.’

Eventually, she made the decision to go to rehab and after eight months, came out sober and at peace.

Many actors who started out as child stars have similar stories to the Bring It On actress from Drew Barrymore to Todd Bridges.

Drew Barrymore was addicted to cocaine, blacklisted from Hollywood and institutionalized after a suicide attempt by the time she was 13 years old

Barrymore is one of the textbook examples of child stars who are forced to grow up too quickly. 

After starring in the 1982 film E.T. when she was just six years old, the actress found herself partying in night clubs with her mom five days a week when she was just eight years old.

‘I had a mom, but she was more like my best friend,’ she said on Norm Macdonald Had a Show (via Today). ‘She was like, “Do you want to go to school and get bullied all day, or do you want to go to Studio 54?” And I was like, “Yes, absolutely!”‘

The list of her troubling habits only ramped up after her parents got divorced when she was nine years old. By the time she was 12, she was addicted to alcohol and cocaine. 

After being blacklisted from Hollywood over her addiction and a brief stint in rehab, Barrymore hit rock bottom when she was 13 years old. 

 ‘When I was 13, that was probably the lowest,’ she told the Guardian. ‘Just knowing that I really was alone. And it felt… terrible. It was a really rebellious time. I would run off. I was very, very angry.’

13 was the year that the Charlie’s Angels star had attempted to commit suicide and was institutionalized by her mom. She was treated at the hospital for 18 months for her drug and alcohol addiction in addition to her mental health struggles. 

 When she was released at age 14, she emancipated herself from her parents. She explained that the decision was important since she wasn’t learning responsibility from her parents or living as a child actress. 

‘It really is a recipe for disaster,’ she told Macdonald. ‘But you know what’s exciting? I got my s— over with at, like, 14. Like, midlife crisis, institutionalized, blacklisted, no family, like, got it done, and then got into the cycle of being my own parent, figuring it out.’

‘It’s sad that there’s this weird alchemy about kids doing this line of work that f—- all of them up, and I’m no different.’

She wasn’t done experiencing mature life experiences at 14. She was married to her first husband Jeremy Thomas in 1994 when she was 19 years old but divorced a year later. She got married and divorced to Tom Green and Will Kopelman but enjoys her life as a single woman these days. 

Additionally, she stays away from hard drugs – even though she still drinks in moderation.

Robert Downey Jr. developed a drug addiction at eight years old while growing up in Hollywood

Since Downey’s father, Robert Downey Sr, was a big-shot Hollywood producer and actor, the Iron Man star was immersed in the world of Hollywood right from the start.

His father was also a drug addict and didn’t keep that aspect of his life from his son. In fact, he invited him into it.

During an interview with The New Breed, his father brought him to a party and let him try marijuana for the first time at age eight.   

‘There was always a lot of pot and coke around,’ Downey said of his childhood. Eventually, it became the only way he knew how to connect with his father. 

‘When my dad and I would do drugs together,’ he explained. ‘It was like him trying to express his love for me in the only way he knew how.’ 

Downey pursued his own career in acting while he was a teenager. He got his break when he starred in Weird Science in 1985 at the age of 20 and was cast on Saturday Night Live in the same year. 

However, his drug usage only ramped up as he gained more stardom. In 1994, the star was arrested for speeding while drunk and having heroin, cocaine and an unloaded .356 magnum in his passenger seat. 

Over the next couple years, he was arrested numerous times for his drug-fueled behavior. 

By 1996, his neighbor had called 911 on him after her had accidentally passed out in their teenaged son’s bed. This trend continued throughout the 90s and eventually led to him spending time in jail. 

While appearing in court in 1999, the actor admitted, ‘Taking drugs to me is like having a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.’ 

In 2003, his wife-to-be Susan Downey, gave him an ultimatum and told him he’d have to give up drugs if he wanted to marry her in August 2005. 

In 2013, he told Daily Mail that he went through a 12-step program to get sober. Once he was at the other end of his drug addiction, he redeemed his career by landing the role of Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Lindsay Lohan started struggling with cocaine and alcohol at a younger age than she had initially admitted

Lohan was a beloved child star who first won over audiences while starring as twins Annie and Hallie in the 1998 hit movie The Parent Trap – a role that she secured at the tender age of 11.

After featuring in the movie, which also starred Natasha Richardson and Dennis Quaid, Lohan skyrocketed to fame, quickly racking up a slew of other high-profile credits, including Freaky Friday in 2003 and Mean Girls in 2004. 

However, the pressures of the industry took a toll on Lohan. The actress initially claimed the first time she had tried cocaine was when she was 21 and was never much of a drinker – even though she claimed to have had her first hangover at age 17.

Lohan made headlines in 2007 when she was arrested for cocaine possession and drunk driving. She described the arrest as ‘totally irresponsible – a stupid mistake’ on CNN’s Piers Morgan Live and insisted it was her first time trying cocaine.

‘And from then on, the press were on me all the time,’ Lohan said. ‘It was the first time I’d taken drugs. I was out in a club with people I shouldn’t have been with, and took cocaine, and got in the car. It was so stupid.’

She insisted that since that incident, she had only used the drug three or four times. During that same interview, she admitted she uses ‘pot’ and ‘Ecstasy’ as her drug of choice.

However, her father Michael claimed that was far from the truth and that she had been doing drugs at least since she was 18 years old, revealing a time he got a call about her overdosing.

‘Lindsay was filming in New Orleans and I got a call saying she had overdosed on cocaine. One of her assistants had given her the drug,’ he told The Sun. ‘I was so angry I got a gun from the house and planned to go to New Orleans to kill him.’

He also accused her of abusing Adderall and vodka at that point. 

It was then that the Mean Girls star got at least a little more candid about her history with drug use. 

During an interview with Oprah Winfrey, the actress admitted that she had used cocaine closer to ten to 15 times.

‘I was terrified of being judged,’ she admitted, and additionally fessed up to being an ‘addict’ when it came to alcohol. 

‘That, in the past, was a gateway to other things for me,’ she said. ‘I tried cocaine with alcohol.’

‘I never felt good the next day,’ she said while explaining that she’d have the drug because it ‘allowed me to drink more. It was a party thing. People would have it, and I’d do it.’

Lohan had been in and out of rehab six times by that point. She also opened up about the jail time she did in 2010 for violating her probation and how she saw her own cry for help.

‘Having all the chaos around me that I was so comfortable with, I somewhere inside knew I wanted to go to jail,’ she said. ‘And I think that that was subconsciously being put out there just by my actions, or lack thereof.’ 

She fell of the radar for sometime but re-emerged as a business owner in 2019 and continues to identify as being in recovery. After opening a since-shuttered nightclub in Greece, the former child star got engaged to Bader Shammas and announced that she plans on returning to acting.

So far, she has filmed Falling For Christmas with Chord Overstreet – set for release later this year – and some commercials for companies like Planet Fitness and Allbirds.

Edward Furlong’s sordid relationship with adult tutor as a minor and early Terminator 2 fame lead to a life of addiction

Furlong was unexpectedly thrown into the world of acting when he was discovered by Terminator 2’s casting director Mali Finn. 

‘[Edward] didn’t come in through an agency, he’d never been in anything, she literally just went out to find raw untried talent,’ the film’s director James Cameron told EW.

‘I was in a place called the Pasadena Boys Club,’ Furlong recalled. ‘[Mali] says, “Can I have you come and audition for a movie? I can’t tell you what it is, but take my number down, and call me.”‘

While Terminator 2 was a big at theaters in 1991, behind the scenes, he began dating his 26-year-old tutor, Jackie Domac, when he was just 13 years old. 

The controversial relationship continued until 1999 when Domac sued him for domestic violence. In court documents obtained by the New York Post, Domac ‘was subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse, threats, violent outbursts [and] outrageous and unlawful attacks.’

All the while, Furlong continued to consistently book roles. However, he also picked up on some other dangerous habits. By 2000, when he was 23 years old, the actor checked into rehab but it didn’t keep him from continuing to use after he was released. 

‘I was a heroin and cocaine addict. It was really scary,’ he admitted to People in 2012. The star was initially considered for the 2003 Terminator 3 sequel but was fired due to his addiction.

‘Essentially, I overdosed on drugs. I had a contract. And that always really bummed me out,’ Furlong admitted to Forbes. 

As he continued on with his career, his drug habits and violent tendencies continued as well. Eventually, his name started appearing in headlines again after his wife Rachael Bella filed for divorce in 2009 – claiming that the son they had in 2006 tested positive for cocaine.

The actor ended up serving jail time in 2013 after he violated their restraining order in 2010. 

In court, she claimed that he ‘grabbed me, bruised me, pushed me … left messages saying he would hire people to come and beat me with chains and bats. He is smoking cocaine and doing other various drugs. He is very unpredictable.’

Nowadays, the actor claims to be clean and has reflected on the impact that being a child actor had on his drug addiction.

‘It was literally overnight success. It was insane. I’m still coming to grips with the shock and awe of it all… I got into things that weren’t good for me – for a long time,’ he said during his 2019 interview with Forbes.

‘I was a kid who had a lot happening all at once. And I wasn’t really able to process it,’ he continued.

‘Early career, I remember it was crazy to me. It’s insane for a little kid to get that much power. Especially if you don’t really have any parents.’

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Amanda Bynes started her drug journey at age 16 and ended up addicted to Adderall

Bynes was an icon during her child acting days. She landed the coveted gig of being on the tween sketch show All That and her popularity on the show lead to her getting her own series called The Amanda Show.

Once she booked the TV series What I Like About You in 2002 when she was 16 years old, she began smoking marijuana. 

‘Even though everyone thought I was the “good girl,” I did smoke marijuana from that point on,’ she said during her renowned interview with Paper in 2018.

From that point on, she started experimenting with harder drugs.  

‘[I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice,’ she explained. Then she discovered Adderall.

 ‘I definitely abused Adderall,’ she told the outlet. She shared that she was ‘reading an article in a magazine that [called Adderall] ‘the new skinny pill”‘ while filming Hairspray in 2007. 

‘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 recalled and that’s when her addiction began. 

She continued to abuse the drug as she filmed the 2010 flicks Easy A and Hall Pass.

‘When I was doing Hall Pass, I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [more] high [that way],’ she admitted. 

 ‘I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines or memorize them for that matter.’

She ended up quitting the movie mid-filming due to ‘the mixture of being so high that I couldn’t remember my lines and not liking my appearance.’

However, it was the film that she went through with that led to her quitting acting.  

‘I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it [Easy A],’ she said, adding that her thoughts were possibly a result of her being ‘high on marijuana.’

That’s when she infamously announced her acting retirement on Twitter. 

 ‘If I was going to retire [the right way], I should’ve done it in a press statement — but I did it on Twitter,’ the actress said. ‘Real classy! But, you know, I was high and I was like, “You know what? I am so over this,” so I just did it.’

Unfortunately, her addiction only spiraled further out of control after she left Hollywood. 

‘I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me,’ she explained.

It was during that 2018 interview, though, that she revealed she was clean. She was also in sober living, where she met her fiance Paul Michael, and under a conservatorship.

However, as of March 2022, Bynes was granted freedom from the conservatorship after being inspired by Britney Spears. 

Todd Bridges got addicted to drugs and lived on the streets after Diff’rent Strokes

Bridges became a sitcom sensation after he starred as ‘What you talkin bout’ Willis Jackson when he was just 13 years old.

Unfortunately, a life in the limelight that was preceded by years of abuse from his father and being molested by a family member led him down a dark path.

He started doing drugs as he was still filming the sitcom when he was 15 or 16 years old. 

‘I wouldn’t do it on the set. I would never do that. I would always wait until the weekends and do it just to try to forget what I was going through,’ he clarified during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. 

By the time he was 20, he was addicted to drugs and two years after Diff’rent Strokes wrapped in 1986, he was living on the streets.  

‘I had no shoes on, no shirt on, no money in my pocket, and I felt horrible about myself,’ he explained. ‘I felt that my life was over.’ 

He started dealing drugs including marijuana, cocaine and speed in order to survive.

‘I wasn’t Willis when I was over here. I was Todd Bridges, the drug dealer,’ he stated. ‘I was considered a pretty notorious character.’ 

He added: ‘I had a .45-caliber MAC-10 I used to carry on me. I had a 9 mm, and if I showed you it and it came out of my waistband, you were shot. It was a matter of survival of the fittest.’ 

He hit a low point when he became addicted to meth and cut himself off from his family. The former child star once stayed up doing drugs for 14 days straight.

He explained that he ‘started having grand mal seizures’ and extremely vivid and intense hallucinations of ‘little green men’ that he was shooting at.

When he was 26 years old, he was pulled over by police and contemplated committing suicide by police by pointing his gun at them. 

‘I put my hand on my gun because I was so tired of living,’ he confessed. ‘Not that I was going to shoot the police officers, but I was going to point it at them and make them shoot me to really take away the pain.’

However, he chose not to and decided to use the opportunity to get clean. 

‘This voice said to me: “Don’t do that. Let go of it and let them take you in,'”‘ he explained. ‘I always say that the Burbank police officers didn’t really arrest me. They rescued me in my time of need.’

He was treated for recovery while he was there, but the process wasn’t easy. The actor had an outburst during his recovery that was so aggressive he was stripped down, strapped to a bed and was forced to wear a diaper.

‘I go: “This has got to stop. I’ve got to get my life together,”‘ he declared at the time and that was the moment he decided he’d be taking recovery seriously and is still sober to this day. 

He even made a brief return to acting in a cameo for ABC’s 2021 Live In front of a Studio Audience.

Jodie Sweetin became an alcoholic at age 14 which spiraled into a life of hiding a meth addiction when she was just 20 years old

Sweetin first stepped into the role of Stephanie Tanner on Full House when she was just five years old. The hit 90s sitcom ran up until she turned 13. It was at that point that she started to feel lost. 

‘I had this extra hurdle to overcome, of trying to prove who I wasn’t — that I wasn’t, the girl from Full House,’ she said on Good Morning America in 2008.

‘But I didn’t really know who Jodie was and looking for other things to, to fix that and kind of fill that void,’ she continued.

That’s when the child star turned to drugs. Sweetin drank for the first time at her co-star Candace Cameron Bure’s wedding when she was 14 years old and had ‘two bottles of wine.’

‘That first drink gave me the self-confidence I had been searching for my whole life,’ she wrote in her 2009 memoir, unSweetined. ‘But that set the pattern of the kind of drinking that I would do.’

As the actress struggled to book roles, she picked up on more drug habits and was in an d out of rehab throughout her teens. When she was in high school, she started doing ecstasy and by the time she was in college, she turned to cocaine. 

She was 20 years old when she first tried meth and developed a severe addiction that she managed to hide balancing married life with her then-husband Shaun Golguin. 

‘Everything revolved around my addiction,’ she told People in 2008 about her time using meth.

 ‘On a typical day I’d wake up and feel terrible because I hadn’t done any. You’re either trying to get it, doing it or worrying about when you’re going to get it next. You don’t even realize that it’s taken over so quickly.’

After she ended up in the hospital in 2005, she admitted she had a problem and committed to treatment and moving into a sober-living house.

Unfortunately, her addiction returned when when she was divorcing her second husband Cody Herpin and fighting with him over custody for their baby daughter, Zoie, in 2008.

She described in her memoir that she hit ‘big rock bottom’ when the court ordered an emergency custody investigation after she had drove with her kid on two glasses of wine. 

 ‘From that day forward, I threw myself into going to AA and avoided people who do blow off their coffee tables,’ she wrote.

Unfortunately, she relapsed once again in 2013 after she and her third husband Morty Coyle filed for legal separation and got hooked on painkillers after a car accident. 

She quickly sobered up after that point and has fortunately stayed sober since. She is happily engaged to Mescal Wasilewski and was able to return for the Full House reboot Fuller House, which ran form 2016 to 2020. 

Since then, she has spoken out about the toll living in the limelight as a child.

‘I was attacked as a kid in the tabloids,’ she said on the Allison Interviews podcast. ‘I can’t stand tabloid magazines or even social media these days.’

‘I think anyone who goes after these kids, whether it’s how they dress, or how someone is parenting them, when they are out in public, leave them alone.’

Corey Feldman got hooked on cocaine and heroin and eventually called being forced into being an actor at age three ‘child slavery’

Feldman was a renowned teen star in the 80s, starring in hit films like The Goonies (1985), Stand By Me (1986) and The Lost Boys (1987). However he got his start in the industry much earlier on, starring in commercials when he was just three years old.

The actor doesn’t speak of those times fondly, telling The A.V. Club, ‘Well, at 3 years old, kids don’t really find their way into anything or make any type of decisions.’ 

He added: ‘At 3 years old, it’s called child slavery, and that’s what I endured: Child slavery. So I was a slave child who got very fortunate in his early career… or I guess my parents got very fortunate, I should say.’

His parents were both in the entertainment industry. His father, Bob Feldman, was a bassist who’d get high with his son and his mother, Sheila Feldman, was a Playboy model who force-fed him diet pills. 

After his parents split up when he was 11 years old, he stole one of his grandfather’s guns and kept it under his bed. 

‘I used to hold it to my head every night and go, “God, why am I so ugly? Why am I so fat?” I hated myself and wanted to kill myself,’ he told People in 1992. 

His father served as his manager but after one of his assistants molested him and introduced him to drugs, the actor legally emancipated from his parents when he was 15 years old.

His addiction also developed at this point. While he was filming Stand By Me in 1986, he was introduced to alcohol and marijuana. By the time he had filmed The Lost Boys in 1987, he became addicted to cocaine and also used mushrooms and acid.

Eventually, he got hooked on heroin. The actor was arrested for three times on drug charges before he checked into rehab in 1990. 

While he reportedly got clean by 1995, his former co-star and best friend Corey Haim wasn’t able to escape addiction.

The two launched a reality series called The Two Coreys in 2008 and even discussed the number of times they had allegedly been sexually assaulted as child stars.

Unfortunately, Haim had relapsed partway into the second season and Feldman broke contact with him.

‘As a friend and somebody that cares deeply about the guy, I am not going to watch him destroy himself,’ he told People.

Haim passed away in 2010 after overdosing on a combination of Valium, Soma, Vicodin and Xanax.   

Feldman has continued to tell their story in his 2013 memoir Coreyography and even released a documentary called My Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys in 2020.