The Liberation of Charlie Sheen
When Charlie Sheen looked into the camera and began speaking candidly about himself, it became clear just how much time had passed. Nearly 15 years ago, Sheen was making headlines not only for his drug-addled antics that were frequently captured by paparazzi, but for the statements he often made in interviews. His most infamous interview was on the ABC News program 20/20, in which he quipped, “I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.” More to the point, Sheen said, “I was bangin' seven-gram rocks and finishing them because that's how I roll, because I have one speed, one gear [...] I'm different. I have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart. I got tiger blood, man. Dying's for fools, dying's for amateurs.” And thus, along with Sheen’s frequent claims of “winning”, an enduring meme was born.
Much of Sheen’s escapades have been forgotten in the decade and a half since those remarks were burned into the cultural zeitgeist. The world has, in many ways, moved on, and one might even be forgiven for forgetting about Charlie Sheen altogether, as he too faded from the public eye. But the September 2025 release of the surprisingly poignant two-part Netflix documentary, aka Charlie Sheen, has shed some fascinating new light on Sheen. The film, which is best viewed in a single sitting, clarifies not just the distance Sheen has come since the early 2010s, but how far the world has come as well. It reveals not just the struggles Sheen has overcome during this time, but also how he approaches the question of his own sexuality. That question, and Sheen’s answer to it, is not central to understanding his journey, but it is part of a mosaic that ultimately helps us understand how one might approach the question of fluid sexuality today.
The author and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis once famously described the rise of Charlie Sheen in his “Tiger Blood” era as signaling the end of the old cultural reality — that of “Empire” — and heralding the dawn of “Post-Empire.” Ellis used the concept in a loose yet straightforward way: “Empire” was America in the decades following World War II, defined by aspiration toward conventional success, traditional media with its powerful gatekeepers, and the heroic symbolism of almost universally beloved public figures and celebrities. “Post-Empire”, by contrast, was the America that began to form after 9/11 and crystallized in 2010, defined by pretensions of transparency and hyper-authenticity, defiance against establishment norms, unabashed individual expression, and symbolic figures embodying all these characteristics. While so many people have come to fit this description in the years since Ellis’s coinage, no one embodied “Post-Empire” in the early 2010s more than Charlie Sheen.
Seeing a clean, sober, and seemingly stable Charlie Sheen open up in aka Charlie Sheen, well over a decade since his public self-destruction helped define the culture of the early 2010s, puts a shudder-inducing chill in the air. After all, what defined the Tiger Blood era? President Barack Obama had yet to win his second term. Internet feminism — and feminine managerialism — was on the rise. Millennial mollycoddlism was only starting to reveal itself. The “Stomp clap hey” style of upbeat indie pop dominated the musical trends alongside the inescapable, gravity-of-a-dying-sun pull of EDM festivals. As Ellis put it, the era, which began in 2010 when “Cee Lo Green's ‘Fuck You’ gleefully played over the soundtrack,” and when “Lady Gaga [stared] at Anderson Cooper and [admitted] she likes to smoke weed when she writes songs — basically daring him: ‘What are you gonna do about that, bitch?’” was one in which some of the old guard did not “get it.” It was also a time when some of the new guard, like “Ricky Gervais’s hosting of the Golden Globes”, absolutely did “get it.” And amid it all was Charlie Sheen, with his loudly anarchic personality somehow both clashing with the surface-level sunny optimism of the era and also defining it with its brash authenticity.
Without even fully realizing it, Sheen’s unhinged performance (which was indeed authentic, as we learn) coincided with the beginning of a chaotic era in American history. In tandem with Sheen’s apparent descent into madness was the rise of a new American populism, first appearing in the form of the Tea Party movement, then Occupy Wall Street, and later, the political rise of Donald Trump. In every variation, the “enemy” was always the same: the old, corrupt “Establishment.”
The Tiger Blood years certainly feel like ancient history, but when viewed from a distance, it starts to feel like perhaps everyone in the United States was at least microdosing the “drug called Charlie Sheen.” And watching Sheen analyze his life from the perspective of someone who survived such a tumultuous era certainly helps us appreciate the hangover in which our culture currently finds itself. As Sheen makes it clear at various points in the documentary, the party can’t last forever, and the longer it goes on, the harder the landing is once we inevitably fall.
A tremendous amount of ground is covered in the two feature-length halves of this aka Charlie Sheen, starting with early homemade films shot by Sheen and his brother, actor-director Emilio Estevez. From there, it moves all the way through Sheen’s own career, making films (including his father Martin’s own harrowing and grimly foreshadowing experience shooting Apocalypse Now!). The narrative finally culminates in mostly tabloid footage of Sheen’s antics intercut with eerily prescient scenes from his notoriously expensive stint on Two and a Half Men. Throughout, everything is punctuated by incredibly revealing interviews with people from Sheen’s life — including his Two and a Half Men co-star Jon Cryer, longtime friend Sean Penn, Sheen’s ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller, and two of Sheen’s children — who provide both charming and heartbreaking commentary on what it was like to be in the orbit of Charlie Sheen. Others include Sheen’s longest friend, Tony Todd, and even his old dealer, Marco Abeta. If this sounds chaotic, that’s because it is; such is the life of Charlie Sheen even in the most orderly of times. But it was this chaotic mix of people, we come to learn, who gradually helped get Sheen back on his feet after his earth-shattering HIV diagnosis in 2015. This includes his old drug dealer, whose account of gradually diluting Sheen’s drugs until they were mostly filler material makes for a surprisingly moving moment.
What keeps one glued to their screen watching this tale unfold is, perhaps ironically, the same thing that kept people watching Sheen gradually self-destruct during the Tiger Blood era, and that’s Sheen’s incomparable candor. Of course, the “candor” Sheen expressed during that period of his life was always filtered through a massive layer of crack cocaine, alcohol, and, apparently, testosterone injections. But we must remember that Bret Easton Ellis’s diagnosis of the pre-Sheen era — that of “Empire” — was wrapped in its own filters, many of which Sheen completely discarded. As Ellis wrote in his piece on Sheen:
“The people unable to process Sheen’s honesty can’t do this because it’s so unlike the pre-fab way celebrity presented itself within the Empire. Anyone who has put up with the fake rigors of celebrity (or has addiction problems) has got to find a kindred spirit here. The new fact is: if you’re punching a paparazzo, you now look like an old-school loser. If you can’t accept the fact that we’re at the height of an exhibitionistic display culture and that you’re going to be blindsided by TMZ […] walking out of a club on Sunset at two in the morning trashed, then you’re basically fucked and you should become a travel agent instead of a movie star. Being publicly mocked is part of the game now and you’re a fool if you don’t play along with it and are still enacting the role of humble, grateful celebrity instead of embracing your fucked-up-ness. […] This is why Charlie seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now.”
One could argue that the openness we saw from Sheen nearly 15 years ago, while he was ranting and raving on talk shows about his “Adonis DNA” was, in its own way, manufactured — that it was part of a character he was embodying, fueled by ungodly amounts of stimulants, alcohol, and synthetic hormones. However, all this time later, when Sheen is several years sober, he remains no less forthright about his personal life. It’s certainly possible that this candor is part of his recovery process, but in the end, that doesn’t really matter, since with this sincerity, Sheen is providing us a genuinely honest, earnest, and perhaps even Post-Post-Empire picture of himself. He is, as he puts it, an open book with nothing to hide.
Perhaps the most surprising revelation in the documentary (depending on one’s proximity to the Hollywood rumor machine) surrounded Sheen’s sexuality. In the final 30 minutes of the second part, Sheen discussed what he describes as sexually exploring “the other side of the menu” during the peak of his drug use. “Let’s go with one of each,” Sheen said with a wry smile. “Let’s go with the chef’s surprise.” This was his way of introducing the audience, with the help of his interviewer, to the fact that he began having sex with men as well as women. Sheen was adamant that “the crack is what started it,” but he also framed his bisexual experiences as a moment of self-discovery, “where it sparked.”
Instead of characterizing his sexual exploration as a drug-induced fever dream that never would have otherwise happened, Sheen ultimately realized, “So what? So what? A lot of it was fuckin’ fun. Life goes on.” When pressed by director Andrew Renzi as to whether this was, in essence, a passing phase, Sheen was again adamant in his refusal: “I don’t wanna nuke the other side of the menu.”
What does this all mean? That Charlie Sheen, the poster-boy of Post-Empire, is an out, loud, and proud bisexual man? That’s for him to say, and no one else. And that’s the essence of true sexual liberation: it is a personal choice and a part of who you are. There’s no reason to be ashamed one way or another, even regardless of the circumstances — self-destructive, in Sheen’s case — in which you came to discover it. Like many, Sheen has avoided labels, but what’s telling is that he could easily have claimed that he regretted his sexual exploration, or pinned it completely on the drugs, and portrayed it as something for which he was ashamed. But he didn’t do that. He expressed shame about how he had treated people in his life during his periods of heavy substance abuse, showing real contrition — but he never expressed shame about his sexuality. If anything, he simply expressed more of the rakish charm that sucked so many people into his orbit to begin with.
The Charlie Sheen ethos has, almost without fail, always been thus: “This is who I am, and I have no reason to hide any of it.” The intense lifestyle of drugs and overall public chaos certainly made that clear, but so has his life of sobriety and recovery. It doesn’t erase the pain he caused to himself or others, but it has arguably allowed him to understand that pain and, thanks to his legendary candor, allowed the rest of us to understand it along with him. It has also revealed a path forward for those who struggle with feelings of shame about their own sexuality, decisions, and self-discoveries. Sheen has accomplished much in his life (and thrown much of it away), but he always hung onto his authenticity and thus, in a sense, his freedom to unapologetically be himself. If that’s not proof of — in Sheen’s classic aphorism — “winning”, then I don't know what is.
Published Oct 16, 2025
