It’s been more than a year since Amanda Bynes has done a sit-down interview – and now, she’s ready. The retired actress is the latest cover star on Paper magazine, and in an interview published on Monday, November 26, she doesn’t hold back. Here are seven revelations from the interview:
You’re Welcome, Channing Tatum
Bynes, now 32, is to thank for Channing Tatum’s leading role in the 2006 rom-com She’s the Man, which helped catapult him to fame. “I totally fought for Channing [to get cast in] that movie because he wasn’t famous yet,” she told the mag. “He’d just done a Mountain Dew commercial and I was like, ‘This guy’s a star — every girl will love him!’ But [the producers] were like, ‘He’s so much older than all of you!’ And I was like, ‘It doesn’t matter! Trust me!’”
Battling Depression
After seeing She’s the Man, in which her character dressed in drag to play her own brother, Bynes entered a tough headspace, she revealed. “I went into a deep depression for four to six months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy,” she said, admitting that was the first time she’d revealed it. “[It was] a super strange and out-of-body experience. It just really put me into a funk.”
Doing Drugs
When she was 16, the former All That star began smoking marijuana. “I didn’t get addicted [then] and I wasn’t abusing it. And I wasn’t going out and partying or making a fool of myself … yet,” she told the magazine. However, it led to molly and ecstasy use. She also tried cocaine three times but didn’t like it. Her drug of choice, instead, was Adderall, which she tried after reading in a magazine that women were taking the drug to stay thin. So, she faked ADD symptoms to get a prescription. While filming Hall Pass in 2010, she couldn’t focus and hated the way she looked when seeing her image on the screen. Ultimately, she pulled out of the movie due to “the mixture of being so high that I couldn’t remember my lines and not liking my appearance.” While she was not fired, she left and now can see that her actions were “completely unprofessional.”
Her Last Movie Role
After seeing Easy-A, the comedy Bynes starred in in 2010, she was appalled by herself — so much so, she was convinced she “needed to stop acting” right away. “I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me. I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people,” she revealed. “It absolutely changed my perception of things.” So she retired, began staying home all the time and ended up in a “really dark, sad world.”
Embarrassing Tweets
Over the years, Bynes has made some brow-raising comments on social media – including a few tweets about hooking up with Drake – which she’s extremely uncomfortable about now. “I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would,” she revealed, apologizing to anyone she had hurt and anyone she had lied about. “It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad,” she said. “Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter. It’s definitely not Twitter’s fault — it’s my own fault.”
Getting Sober
The former child star has been sober for nearly four years since hitting rock bottom and being placed on psychiatric hold and under a conservatorship, and her family has supported her journey. She says she’s not sad about her past drug use and doesn’t miss it but does “feel ashamed” about how she acted: “When I was off of them, I was completely back to normal and immediately realized what I had done — it was like an alien had literally invaded my body. That is such a strange feeling.”
Next Steps
Now, Bynes is focused on fashion. In 2014, she enrolled in FIDM. She first heard about the school by watching The Hills, as Lauren Conrad enrolled there. She’s also excited to begin acting again: “What’s there to lose? I have no fear of the future. I’ve been through the worst and came out the other end and survived it so I just feel like it’s only up from here.”
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