The two-part doc aka Charlie Sheen chronicles the actor’s idyllic youth in Malibu and the roller-coaster years that followed. Courtesy of Netflix Charlie Sheen wouldn’t have been “on this fucking call” if he wasn’t sober.
The Platoon, Wall Street, Spin City and Two and a Half Men star tells The Hollywood Reporter as much while discussing his Netflix documentary, as well as his and Martin Sheen’s reaction to the finished product — which he has described as a “love letter” to his dad — alongside director Andrew Renzi.
In aka Charlie Sheen, the sober (and sobered) actor looks back at his formative — and party — years with surprising clarity. He doesn’t balk at questions about drug abuse, his HIV diagnosis or gay sex. With Charlie, stories that sound too wild to be true were mere hors d’oeuvres for the really crazy shit.
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Part of Renzi’s job was to “figure out what the realities of this fever dream of a life really were,” he tells THR. He had some help.
A treasure trove of archival footage, including Super 8 films from Charlie’s childhood, featuring big brother Emilio Estevez and their good friends, actors Sean and Chris Penn, helped Renzi put the pieces together. But mostly it was Sheen’s “Virgo brain” that filled in the blanks where there definitely should have been more.
“Charlie’s recall is unlike anything I could ever imagine,” Renzi confesses. Even Sheen concedes his memories “shouldn’t be intact and available” after decades of hard living. Yet they are, making boiling this embarrassment of salacious riches down to a 181-minute documentary split into two halves — “Part One,” which chronicles Sheen’s idyllic youth in Malibu, his rise to stardom and his prominence in the Heidi Fleiss sex worker scandal; and the perfectly titled “Part Deux,” a nod to Sheen’s Hot Shots! sequel, which sees him in and out of rehab (and sitcoms), and goes into the discovery of his HIV-positive status — the real filmmaking challenge.
“There’s another version of this movie that I think about frequently, where we get to spend an hour and a half in the ’70s and ’80s with the Super 8 films before [Sheen] even makes a movie. One where Chris Penn becomes a main character. I fell in love with that stuff,” Renzi says. “The realities of where [Sheen’s] story got to made it hard to spend that much time on that. So, we had to figure that balance out.”
Renzi and Sheen are a good virtual hang, even if the latter is a bit annoyed at questions about his health — “I think my presence answers those questions,” he remarks — as well as finances: “Would you ask me that question at a dinner party in front of my parents?” Sheen retorts, insisting, “I’m fine.”
Renzi and Sheen’s first meeting went far smoother, which is why the actor ultimately accepted his documentary pitch.
“I had been approached a couple times, but it never actually got to an in-person meeting,” says Sheen. “It was just a couple of phone calls, or I’d read a pitch breakdown for how somebody thought they should document my history, and none of that spoke to me at all.”
Renzi was different. “I saw a guy that wasn’t interested in a lot of the [tabloid] crap,” Sheen explains. “I saw a guy that wasn’t there to exploit anything, that was there to celebrate the cool shit and to be sensitive — but honest and thorough — with the not-so-cool shit.”
One day before the premiere of aka Charlie Sheen on Sept. 10, Sheen’s autobiography, The Book of Sheen: A Memoir was released by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It also contains both the cool shit and the not-so-cool shit, like decades of drug abuse and the funny-until-it-wasn’t “Tiger Blood” era. The timing was no coincidence, and it was not especially fortuitous for the entertainer.
Sheen says he pushed to have “some space” between his memoir’s release and the docuseries. He only got 24 hours. “Netflix spent all this money to acquire this awesome project,” he says, conveying his understanding of the business decision.
Though the book technically came first, it was the docuseries that “harmed the book [sales],” Sheen says, not the other way around. Still, The Book of Sheen became a New York Times best-seller. The audiobook, read by Sheen, outsold the memoir 3-to-1, he notes.
Charlie’s brother, Emilio, and their pop, Martin, declined to participate in the docuseries, though Renzi gave it his best try. He brought a rough cut of “Part One” to both of them in the hope that it would get them to change their minds. It didn’t, but not for lack of quality.
“Dad had such a specific reaction to it. He said, ‘You don’t need me,’ ” Charlie recalls. “ ‘You don’t need the me of today. You’ve got the really interesting, handsome me. That’s how I want to be in the doc.’ ”
Instead, it was Sean Penn who represented both the youthful days in Malibu and the more recent ones in L.A. Renzi says that interview served as his “anchor” and that Penn’s insight was so all-encompassing that he immediately stopped reaching out to other Hollywood folks.
The doc received generally positive reviews, though it was the One Battle After Another Oscar winner who provided Renzi with his favorite reaction.
“Sean Penn sent me a text and said, ‘You have made something that I have never seen before,’ ” Renzi shares. “ ‘It’s as unique and one-of-a-kind as Charlie Sheen is.’ ”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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