How Clint Eastwood Helped This Hollywood Actor Get Sober

Published: September 12, 2025

By Gavin Boyle

In a new docuseries, Charlie Sheen recalled an intervention by his friends and family that would have gone sour had he not been encouraged by Clint Eastwood.

“I get invited to my dad’s birthday party,” Sheen said in the docuseries when recalling the intervention that took place in 1990. “I think Mom called me: ‘Dad’s got things to do, so we have to do it early.’ She’s like ‘We’re thinking 9:00.’ I’m like, ‘a.m.?’ She’s like, ‘Yeah.’ She brings me into the house, and I’m looking for balloons, a cake, funny hats…And as I come around the corner, I see the living room has this really expertly organized circle of people.”

The group of people who showed up to help Sheen get his life back on track included his siblings, a yoga instructor, his seventh grade history teacher and fellow actor Rob Lowe. As they expressed their concerns and shared letters they had written, Sheen was mainly focusing on how to get out of the situation. He eventually agreed to go to rehab that day but still planned on finding a way out. That was until he received a phone call that caused him to get serious about the whole thing.

“It [was] a very recognizable, very globally familiar voice. It [was] Clint. He said something like, ‘You’ve got to get the train back on the tracks, kid…You’re worth saving,’” Sheen recalled. “It was really powerful. I thanked him, gave the phone back to Dad and said, ‘All right, let’s go.’”

Thus began decades of working to wean himself off of addictions to drugs and alcohol. Though it was a very long road, Sheen has been completely sober since 2017, crediting this life change to genuinely wanting to live clean. This wholehearted desire was cemented after he was unable to drive his daughter to a doctor’s appointment after having a couple drinks in the morning.

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“One morning I’d forgotten my daughter had an appointment I’d promised to drive her to, and I’d already had a couple of pops that day,” Sheen told PEOPLE. “So I had to call my friend Tony to take us. We got her there on time, but it broke my heart because she was in the backseat and I could just tell she was thinking, ‘Why isn’t dad driving?’ So I got home and sat with that for the rest of the day. And the next morning I just stopped.”

Praise the Lord for the people in Sheen’s life who encouraged him to get sober and for his genuine heart change which allowed him to turn his life around instead of throwing it away through drugs and alcohol.

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