In his new memoir ‘Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard’, Tom Felton spoke openly about his substance abuse and mental health struggles. As noted by Entertainment Weekly, the Harry Potter alum revealed that throughout much of his 20s, he began "drinking to escape" and spent a lot of time at dive bars in Los Angeles, noting that the troubles often spilled into his professional life.
"Drinking becomes a habit at the best of times," Felton writes in ‘Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard’. "When you're drinking to escape a situation, even more so. The habit spilled out of the bar and, from time to time, on to set."
"It came to the point where I would think nothing of having a drink while I was working,” Felton continued “I'd turn up unprepared, not the professional I wanted to be. The alcohol, though, wasn't the problem. It was the symptom. The problem was deeper," Felton said learning about his struggling mental health.
He then went on to share how his managers, lawyer, and former girlfriend Jade Olivia staged an intervention demanding he get help as they were concerned about his drinking and behavior. "Everybody in the room had written me a letter," he recalled.
"I listened to Jade and the others as they told me how concerned they were about my behavior, about my drinking and my substance abuse. I was in no state to hear them." He then recalled a message from his lawyer that "hit the hardest" and made him more willing to get help.
Felton shared, "My lawyer, whom I'd barely ever met face to face, spoke with quiet honesty. 'Tom,' he said, 'I don't know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I've been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don't be the twelfth.'"
Following his intervention, Felton entered a rehab facility in Malibu, which he fled less than 24 hours after checking in. He later went to a second rehab facility but revealed that he got kicked out after being found in a girl's room. Another stint in rehab helped him get back on track.
"I am not alone in having these feelings," he wrote. "Just as we all experience physical ill-health at some stage in our lives, so we all experience mental ill-health too. There's no shame in that. It's not a sign of weakness. And part of the reason that I took the decision to write these pages is the hope that by sharing my experiences, I might be able to help someone else who is struggling."
"I'm no longer shy of putting my hands up and saying: I'm not okay," he continued. "To this day I never know which version of myself I'm going to wake up to. Which takes us back to the concept of rehab, and the stigma attached to the word. By no means do I want to casualise the idea of therapy—it's a difficult first step to take—but I do want to do my bit to normalize it. I think we all need it in one shape or another, so why wouldn't it be normal to talk openly about how we're feeling?"
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