Bill & Ted star Alex Winter has credited his decision to temporarily leave Hollywood as the reason his life turned out positively.
Speaking to The Guardian in an article published on Friday, November 7, the actor, 60, reflected on leaving fame behind in pursuit of a less public life after experiencing sexual abuse as a child and facing burnout from his acting career.
Winter told the outlet he was “fried” from acting by 26, and left Los Angeles for New York before moving to London. He opted to lean into work behind the camera instead of in front of it.
“I just wanted to get the hell out of the public eye, and just be on the tube, going to my office in Soho and start a family,” he told The Guardian.
“My career is where I want it, which is that I have the ability to do whatever interests me the most,” he added. “But I would not have been OK had I not split.”
Winter started his career on Broadway at 10, starring in plays The King and I and Peter Pan. At the same time he was working on Broadway, Winter suffered sexual abuse from an unnamed adult who is now dead.
It wasn’t until decades later in 2018 that Winter publicly revealed the abuse and spoke about the impact it had.
“It’s hellish, to be totally frank. You know, it’s hellish,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Adrian Chiles in February 2018 of the effect the abuse had on him. “I don’t think anybody felt like they were going to be heard if they said anything about this type of behaviour, until very recently.”
He continued, “I didn’t feel that I had any place of safety to unlock an extremely sensitive and potentially dangerous secret.”
Winter also spoke about the abuse in an interview with The Guardian in 2020.
“I was dealing with really intense and prolonged abuse,” he told the publication. “There was The King and I — eight shows a week, happy face — feeling genuinely happy in that role. Great relationship with my mom and dad; great relationship with the coworkers around me; doing interviews, signing autographs, living this amazing … and then this nightmarish other existence.”
He continued: “I had extreme PTSD for many, many years, and that will wreak havoc on you. It’s a way in which you relate to the world around you and to yourself, and it’s very nuanced, but you can become very fractured. So you slowly compartmentalise. You keep this thing over here, you keep that thing over there, and you don’t have any natural equilibrium. That fracturing just gets worse and worse and worse.”
In the same interview, he also reflected candidly on why he left Hollywood behind for a more low-key lifestyle elsewhere.
“By your mid-20s, it’s like you’re holding those different selves together with duct tape. That’s when you see kids overdosing or blowing their heads off,” he told The Guardian. “In my case, I was just like, I need to stop doing this thing where these eyes are on me all the time and I don’t feel safe or comfortable … I just want to go ride the subway and help raise a family and do my writing and directing.”
If you or someone you know is experiencing child abuse, call or text Child Help Hotline at 1-800-422-4453.
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