10 Hollywood Hellraisers Who Are Lucky To Be Alive

Tom Hardy went through a tough time in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ but it’s nothing compared to what the actor inflicted unto himself in the grip of his drug addiction.

We look at Hardy and his fellow Hollywood hellraisers, the hard-drinking, hard-smoking, risk-taking, drug-taking bad boys and girls who are lucky to be alive…

Tom Hardy

“I would have sold my mother for a rock of crack,” read the headline: on the eve of 'Mad Max: Fury Road’’s blistering debut at Cannes, Tom Hardy opened up about his dark drugs past. He’s been sober since 2003, when he checked himself into rehab after waking up in a pool of blood and vomit after a night out in Soho.

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If you could smoke it or snort it or inject it, Hardy wanted it – his drug addictions landed him in jail more than once, including a stint for gun possession. “I was told very clearly, 'You go down that road, Tom, you won’t come back. That’s it. All you need to know,’” said Hardy. “That message stayed with me clearly for the rest of my days. I am f***ing lucky to be here.”

Robert Downey Jr

Name a substance and RDJ has probably ingested it. We know him now as one of the highest-paid and best-loved actors in the world, but the 90s were touch and go for Robert Downey Jr, making his eventual status of charismatic blockbuster megastar all the more remarkable.

Coke, black tar heroin and marijuana were just the trip of the self-destructive iceberg; “It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal,” Downey Jr told one of many judges he was hauled in front of.

Rehab didn’t help either – “the guy I was seeing didn’t know I was smokin’ crack in his bathroom,” he said – so it wasn’t until he met now-wife Susan Downey that he settled down and swerved a death sentence of his own making.

Angelina Jolie

These days, La Jolie is the poster child for peace, love and understanding – a UN Ambassador and adoptive mother with her fingers in many charitable pies, Angelina is a role model extraordinaire for young women. It could have all been so different. “I went through heavy darker times and I survived them,” the former hellraiser admits.

"I’ve done just about every drug possible. Coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything. I didn’t die young, so I’m very lucky. There are other artists who didn’t survive certain things.” Throw in a few tabloid-baiting quotes to get the press going – “You’re young, you’re in bed, you have knives, s*** happens” – and Jolie was considered a risky hire in Hollywood for a long time.

Charlie Sheen

Admit it: how many of you thought Charlie Sheen wouldn’t make it through the winter of 2011? Long plagued with substance abuse problems, Sheen somehow managed to successfully juggle his drug addictions with his career, becoming star of the most-watched show on television while binging on cocaine.

That all came to a head in 2011, when Sheen was dismissed from 'Two And A Half Men’ and went on a drug-fuelled rampage, claiming he was “winning” in a series of bizarre media interviews which also saw him state that he had “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA”. The actor seems to have calmed of late – his comeback show was called 'Anger Management’ which perhaps explains his cooling down.

Tom Sizemore

The star of 'Saving Private Ryan’ – although that’s perhaps somewhat overestimating his contribution – went through his own personal war with drugs, and you’d be hard-pressed to say he won. The hard-living actor’s drug of choice was meth, and he was arrested and jailed for 16 months for possession. In scenes reminiscent of 'Withnail & I’, Sizemore was once caught trying to to pass a drugs test using a fake bladder called 'The Whizzinator’.

He struggled with drug addictions since he was 15, but Sizemore had problems with women too; his relationship with 'Hollywood madam’ Heidi Fleiss was abusive and was fuelled by cocaine. When the pair were reunited on reality TV series 'Celebrity Rehab With Dr Drew’, fireworks flew – but Sizemore has allegedly been sober since.

Jack Nicholson

Nicholson has lived larger than most other people on this list: drugs, alcohol, sex – even food. It’s not surprising that the star of 'Easy Rider’ smoked more than one joint while shooting, and yes, he did inhale. “The acting job became reversed,” said Nicholson. “Instead of being straight and having to act stoned, I was now stoned and having to act straight.” Subsequent screenplays 'The Trip’ and Monkees psychedelia-fest 'Head’ were written by a man who clearly hadn’t been sober in years.

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Women were perhaps Jack’s biggest vice – he bedded thousands of girls, some 30 years his junior, and according to one report, stopped halfway through one lovemaking session to eat an entire apple pie. How his heart hasn’t given out we have no idea.

Drew Barrymore

These days she’s the cardigan-wearing queen of kooky romantic comedies, but from the moment Barrymore won the hearts of audiences the world over in 'E.T.’, fame got its claws into her and dragged her into a spiral of narcotics, alcohol and general bad juju. Her laundry list of misdeeds reads like every parent’s nightmare: cigarettes at age 9, boozing at 11, smoking dope at 12 and snorting coke at 13.

If she had continued on that trajectory, there’s little doubt she wouldn’t have lived to see the second act of her career – an unsuccessful suicide attempt was the closest she came to curtains before rehab, and an infamous stay with David Crosby and family, set her straight.

Kiefer Sutherland

Jack Bauer likes to party and party hard – you feel for his PA, who presumably spends her time organising late-night cabs, impromptu dry-cleaning and apology letters. Shamefully, Kiefer Sutherland has a nasty habit of drinking and driving and has racked up four separate DUI arrests since 1989, which eventually saw him spend 48 days in jail.

You imagine booze is behind most of Kiefer’s 'encounters’ – he headbutted a fashion designer in 2009 and was filmed assaulting a hotel Christmas tree, after a friend said “Hey Kiefer, you’re a pirate, man!” Sutherland replied “That would explain everything,” before launching his body onto the large festive decoration.

Johnny Depp

He’s played his fair share of hellraisers – you can’t play characters like rum-soaked pirate Jack Sparrow and Hunter S Thompson without a little bit of the madness rubbing off on you – but Johnny Depp has something of a dark side off set as well as on.

“I did mostly alcohol,” the actor says of his vices. “There were drugs, too – pills – and there was a danger that I would go over the edge. I could have. I thank God I didn’t. Family and friends sat me down and said, 'Listen, we love you. You’re important to us, and you’re f***ing up. You’re killing yourself. You’re killing us in the process.’"

Depp’s problems with alcohol still surface; he checked into rehab earlier this year, delaying production on 'Pirates 5’.

Mark Wahlberg

He talks the talk, but he also walks the walk – Mark Wahlberg’s tough guy act isn’t an act at all, because he really did grow up on the wrong side of the tracks and has the convictions to show it. A cocaine addict at age 13, the man who would one day become 'Marky Mark’ was a regular visitor to the Boston PD cells – he was arrested approximately 25 times and had two civil action lawsuits for assault levelled at him by age 15.

"As soon as I began that life of crime, there was always a voice in my head telling me I was going to end up in jail,” said Wahlberg. “Finally I was there, locked up with the kind of guys I’d always wanted to be like. Now I’d earned my stripes and I was just like them, and I realised it wasn’t what I wanted at all.” Thankfully for all of us, what he wanted was to be an underpants model-turned-actor: consider that dream well and truly realised.

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Image credits: Rex Features