By Michaela Gordoni
ZOOTOPIA actor Jason Bateman credits his wife, Amanda Anka, with helping him get sober and bring peace to their home.
“Amanda and I definitely had a few negotiations about the point at which the [partying] spigot was going to completely turn off,” Bateman said. “She’d be like, ‘This drip, drip, drip is annoyingly unpredictable, Jason.’”
She “didn’t demand that I completely absolve, but that was sort of the back-and-forth, and I was like, well, I feel like my [sobriety] ETA is six months away, but if I could land this plane now, it would alleviate a lot of the tension, so let’s just [expletive] do it,” he said.
He says when he became an adult, he was a partier because he had been working through his childhood and wanted to get his “wiggles out.”
“It was like RISKY BUSINESS for 10 years,” he recalled of the ’90s. “My parents were out of town, they left me a bunch of money, the car, and the house, and I didn’t know when they were coming home. I had worked so hard that by the time I turned 20, I wanted to let loose. And I did that very effectively.”
“Fortunately, I was living at a time without social media and camera phones, so I got away with a lot, but it was definitely close a few times,” Bateman said.
He saw the paths some of his friends went down and decided he didn’t want that to happen to him.
“I was lucky enough to recognize, ‘This is probably as far as I should go if I still want to accomplish the things that I want to get to,’” said Bateman.
“Having thought, ‘This is really fun’, and staying at the party a little bit too long, I’d lost my place in line in the business; it was a case of trying to claw that back towards the end of the 90s, and not getting a lot of great responses,” he told The Irish Times.
He told Howard Stern that he had decided he wanted to “be an adult” and was ready to stop drinking.
“I was conscious the whole time of wanting to get a lot of these boxes checked before I became a father and a guy with a career that I not only wanted but had a feeling I might be able to get it if I just got the right job,” he explained in a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter.
Bateman will celebrate 25 years of sobriety this year, and he and his family are all the better for it.
Read Next: Actor Danny Trejo Credits ‘Grace of God’ for 55 Years Sober
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