The Rich Roll Podcast - Joe Manganiello On Getting Sober, The Mystery Illness That Almost Killed Him & The Trauma We Inherit

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

Joe Manganiello is an actor (True Blood, Magic Mike, One Piece) and author of Bloodlines. This conversation explores his odyssey of pain and suffering, self-discovery, and ultimately spiritual transformation – from a near-fatal illness to a family history that upended what he thought he knew. Learning that this podcast helped him make sense of his healing was a reminder of why I do this. Joe's journey is unreal. And he tells it beautifully. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Squarespace: Use code RichRoll to save 50% off your first order of a website or domain👉🏼https://www.squarespace.com/RichRoll  WHOOP: Join now and get one month free👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll  Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much👉🏼https://www.airbnb.com/host  Momentous: Get up to 35% off your first order👉🏼https://www.livemomentous.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors  Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Like, look at all this blood. Like, you don't have more. Like, I knew I was going to die. For the last 14 years, I've hosted over 1,000. and conversations of this podcast. Today's stands out. It's very special, perhaps among my all-time favorites, because it's a beautiful, powerful, and emotional illustration

of the central themes of this show. The power and potential of the human spirit to face and overcome obstacles. What happens when you embark upon a mind, body, and spirit journey of personal transformation? And the transcendent healing that transpires when you make peace with your past. My partner in this exploration is Joe Mangonello, a longtime sober artist, actor, filmmaker, and action star, best known for his roles in Spider-Man, True Blood, Magic Mike, Justice League,

and for sporting perhaps the best physique in Hollywood. What you likely don't know is that just as his career was about to go stratospheric, Joe began to secretly suffer from a mysterious, seemingly undiagnosable autoimmune disorder that on more than one occasion very nearly took his life. What he survived is truly superhuman. I'm bleeding all night long in the bathroom in massive amounts of pain. They brought me into an emergency surgery. Whatever you thought your life was, it's over. Even more impressive is how he survived it. How he turned a healing journey I wouldn't wish on anyone into this powerful new why that has birthed a more meaningful relationship with living.

All of which he illustrates with tremendous vulnerability in bloodlines, his rather gripping newly released memoir now available everywhere. This one hits, I can't stop thinking about it, and the life lessons he generously shares, and I have a sneaking suspicion, you will feel the same. So Joe, typically when I have a sober person on the show, I try to do some version or rendition of what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. In your case, I want to do that, but there's a ripple to your version of this story that is sort of turbocharged in the what it's like now, like third act part. that is almost something like who came before me, how did that influence me and my life? What did I do with that?

And what it's like in the now after the what it's like now. You know what I mean? Yes. Yeah. And sobriety is a huge part of my life, obviously. But the process of getting sober turned me into version 2.0. but it was somewhat a warm up for the fight that I then had heading into version 3.0, which I wasn't sure if I was going to make it too.

Yeah. It's almost as if, like, I did all this work. I've arrived in this place. I've rebuilt my life. I've created this amazing, abundant life. And now this, like, I didn't bank on this. I didn't have this. this on my whiteboard, haven't I suffered enough? And here comes this freight train in your

direction asking you to deepen your surrender and undergo like truly this odyssey of pain and suffering, self-discovery and ultimately spiritual transformation. Yeah, it was, but looking back, I can see that even into sobriety, there were things that weren't quite lining up. In the book, I start a chapter with this phrase that an old manager of mine used to say to me and she used to say, you know, Joe, for a lucky guy, you're pretty fucking unlucky. There was something that just wasn't quite lining up all the time. And I think what she was commenting on was the fact, or from her vantage point, that somebody who had been given seemingly endless amounts of advantages in life, things were still out of focus for me. And then, of course, the symptoms start rearing their heads and that freight train.

I can see the lights of the freight train and I understand shit. I'm on the tracks. and how do I get off these tracks? Why am I on these tracks? Have I always been on these tracks? And then that spurred, yes, like you said, the Odyssey, which was basically 10 years at Z trying to find my way back home or trying to understand if I was going to survive this thing at all or what the hell was happening to me.

And where there were no answers. And so it started this journey through, journey across the globe. globe for answers that also took me backwards in time. And what I realized was that there was a series of knots that were tied, just a series of knots. And sobriety was a part of it. And that God, I was sober. I think that really was a warm up and a practice because the act of getting sober and staying sober, the act of healing spiritually, of growing spiritually, then providing

for me a framework or a foundation or an openness to other answers. Because I think, you know, in that initial period of my life prior to getting sober, I was given, you know, I was given certain answers. You know, you grow up in a certain time, a certain place, the people you're around believe a certain thing. You're taught right from wrong or not. I mean, in my case, I was taught right from wrong with a certain system in place. And at some point, you let go of that or realize maybe that isn't for me or I don't believe all of this or, you know, I'm talking about like, you know, kind of a spiritual, you know, foundation.

And then, you know, when you sink into addiction, I think there's a godlessness that happens because you're up to things that you're hoping. If there is a God, they're not watching you do. And so I think you then start thinking, you know, if God is everything or God is nothing, then God has to be nothing. And so there's this kind of atheism, I think, that starts to happen. And then the process of getting sober, I think a lot of people trip up over the God thing. But if you go to any AA meeting, it's just like a bunch of people who look like maniacs or like, you know, like people who are not at church.

You know, that's the reason why, you know, A,A, they're in the basement. They're in the basement of the church, you know. So it's a lot of people that, that aren't your typical church going fair, searching for some sort of spirituality or some sort of healing. And I, and I, and so they ask you to, you know, kind of 12 steps ask you to famously just choose a God of your understanding. There's something bigger than you. And that started all that questioning that then helped me. because I really do feel like this version 3.0 or battling the battle that would come, that freight train that was heading towards me would force me into a life or death situation

where I had to find something to believe or I was at least shown what to believe. I'm of the opinion that many an addict, if not all addicts, become addicts on some level because they're seeking something. They're seeking some kind of connection. They're doing it in an errant way that derails their lives. But fundamentally, it's a search for answers down dark alleys and in wrong directions.

And then when you're in the throes of it, yeah, it's a spiritual bleakness. Well, spirits, right? Yeah, you are possessed. Yeah. Or like Trent Rezner used to talk about a lot of that and a lot of the early Ninth Nile stuff, like, you know,

trying to get close. to God or find things that will get you there, get you there, you know. Get you to feel something beyond like the three-dimensional realm. And then sobriety, of course, is a sort of spiritual rebirth and an opportunity to like reestablish or reframe your relationship with the ineffable. And, you know, that's fundamentally the solution. But one thing about AA that's interesting is that as capacious as the steps are for, spiritual transformation. They are as deep as you want to go. Like I think they are, you know,

the source code for, you know, just ultimate change. And, you know, we've all born witness to many a miracle with like, you know, our friends and our colleagues, et cetera. You know, I'm thoroughly convinced that, you know, this is just a divinely inspired program and just it changed my life. I know it changed yours. But within the framework of that program of recovery, there's not a lot of emphasis on you make your amends for your past wrongs, et cetera. But there's sort of an implicit discouragement of trying to understand why you became an alcoholic in the first place, because it's a program of like action and moving forward. Yeah, it's not alcoholics analysis. It's like, who cares why you are? You just are, right? And here's how to fix it and move forward, take these

steps and your life will change. And indeed it will. But what took you from, Joe 2.0 to Joe 3.0 is tackling that very problem, you know, like looking in the rearview mirror and trying to understand, like, everything that led up to making these decisions that you've made, was informed by the people that came before you and the experiences that they had. And, you know, there's a kind of, you know, spirituality and mysticism and that as well with the epigenetics of it and the inherited cycle of generational trauma. And fundamentally, I think that's a source of, to use the word again, like turbocharged healing. Like if you fundamentally want to heal this thing, you are going to have to venture backwards. We're the dig the roots up. I mean, I was for me, and I'm not saying for everybody, but, you know, for me, you know, I wasn't randomly selected for all of this. I think there's a there's an initial there was an initial phase of why me why me why is this happening to me or what the hell is going on or and then you really do start doing some digging

and you realize that this stuff goes deep. I think I have an understanding of what happened to me, but I think that especially when I I would try to talk to Western doctors about it. I was looked upon as being pseudo-scientific for the things that I was thinking. And, and, but I know that there also is scientific precedents for generational trauma. And, you know, I talk in the book about the 2013 Emory University study where rats were introduced to a chemical that gives off the scent of cherry blossoms. And as they were being given the scent of cherry blossoms,

their feet would be electrically shocked. And over time and this repeated conditioning, they then took those rats and mated them with unconditioned females that were not driven to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms through electric shocks, unconditioned. So you have conditioned males meeting with unconditioned females, and the result were offspring that when given the scent of cherry blossoms were terrified and would run the other way. So they had understood that if they can traumatize the males, they will pass this genetic

information onto their offspring, even if the females weren't. Another study, you know, I'm on the board of a company called colossal biosciences, which brought back the dire wolf and... Oh, that same company. Yeah, yeah. Willie mice and all of this... That seems like something you would seek your teeth into. Kind of randomly...

Yeah. It randomly came away. But like, little did they know. They were like, oh, yeah, you were like that werewolf guy and dire wolves are in Donuts and Dragons. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. Like, I'm obsessed with all of this.

And I have a vested interest in epigenetics. And I need to ask you some questions about where we're at right now because I'm trying to unlock this thing within my life. and I want to understand, you know, if there are other spiritual belief systems that could, or, you know, I wanted to know what science said about what I was going through. And there's a Tasmanian tiger, which was made extinct by human hunters, like little under a century ago, about 90 years ago. And they were all wiped out. It's this marsupial wolf with tiger stripes. Super cool. The thylacine is the, you know, the name. So they're bringing back the thylacine. And prior to them reintroducing them to their old

hunting grounds in Tasmania, they went and made perfect full-color cutouts of the animal and stuck them in their old hunting grounds. And the animals, the descendants of the animals that were hunted by the Tasmanian tiger would see the cutouts and run away. They had a fear of just the sight of the cutouts. That's a trip. And they've been extinct for almost a century. So that then spurred a conversation about, well, where is, where do they think generational trauma or that type of trauma?

Where is that stored in the body? He said, no, no, no, no. Mytachondria. I said, okay, well, why did you say, no, no, no? I said, well, the new theory is that the mitochondria is actually a separate organism that we're carrying around, or I was carrying around a dark passenger, which would explain why, when Western medicine was pumping me full of all of these rheumatoid arthritis drugs or anti-cancer pills and combination and massive doses that were having really serious side effects

on me. they were they were shutting my body down without targeting where the trauma was actually kept it was like another organism so they're shutting my body down but this thing is still still riding unscathed which blew my mind and also opened up you know my mind to the understanding of why maybe that wasn't working but there is scientific precedence for this it's not pseudoscience. But I can get into the metaphysics of it all day, you know, kind of the Jungian red booky side of it where, which is definitely where my story took me. I went to some, you know, if it's an, we're using the Odyssey metaphor? You did quite a, yeah. I went to some weird

islands, man, and I saw some weird things on those islands. You had your own Silla and Carbdis and, you know, like the whole thing, you know what I mean? All the way to Odysseus, Matt Damon, lying down on the raft and just saying, God, take me, you know, either I'm going to die or I'm going to make it home. Yes. And home being, in your case, like this spiritual transformation. But let me just say, for the sake of the audience who's listening or watching, like, what are we talking about? Joe, I mean, essentially, I don't know if it was the peak of your career, but like your career's going really well. You're like doing Justice League reshoots and there's the whole Batman thing that's kind of like percolating. Like, there's a lot of opportunity

swirling around you and you get blindsided by this autoimmune disease that is mystifying the Western medicine doctors that that you're, you know, visiting with and leads you into this, you know, to the depths of despair to like just, you know, horrific near-death experiences and just this, you know, ongoing battle with this condition. Nobody could really figure out what to do about or what it is. And this is the essence of Bloodlanger book. Like it's a memoir, but it's really this odyssey-like experience of navigating this disease

and trying to find a way to heal yourself, not just in body, but in mind and spirit. Yes, yeah, trying to understand what happened, why. So walk us up to the point where you get this diagnosis, like what was going on and what happened. Yeah, so I'm, you know, I'm for better or for worse, you know, I'm, I'm a theater actor who becomes known for his physicality. Carnegie Mellon.

Yes. You did a ton of theater. Yes. Yeah. Like mostly theater. Yeah. You've got all these big credits, Magic Mike and True Blood, you know, blah, blah, blah, all this sort of stuff.

but like Thespian artist, you know, in this like, you know, alpha male high performing athletic body. Right. Yes. Yeah. You know, I, you know, went to this great drama school, started off in theater. I have that career. I kind of get skyrocketed. I get rocketed at the beginning. I get the first thing I auditioned for. You like, within like three days of signing with an agent right after college, you get this Spider-Man audition. And they want you for Peter Parker initially, right? Like, this is like happening overnight. Yes.

Yeah. And I know that I'm wrong for Peter Parker. So I wear a different outfit underneath and memorize the other sides that I am correct for. So when they say you're not right for Peter Parker, you might be right for this other part. I say, right, take the shirt off, take the glasses off and go straight into the other audition without needing the script and the castor-in-eater said okay I want you to meet Sam Ramee how long are you in town I was visiting from college I hadn't even graduated you had graduated yeah I mean there's a lot of life lessons just in that story right there

about how to be prepared for moments be prepared hey I'll go to the sides I don't need him what do you mean I don't need him I'm already off book you're off book on the other part yeah I was hoping that you were gonna say I was right for this so I'm ready because all I've got is a resume full of theater credits and I have to compete with people who have been doing it in a long time and I have to get them to trust me. So, okay, I'm ready. So I auditioned. She goes, okay, how long are you in town?

I go, I'll stay as long as you need me. She goes, stay in town, stay by your phone, I'm going to call you. She called Sam Ramey. They were getting ready to screen test all the Spider-Man candidates the following week. And she got me a gig for 500 bucks to play the Flash Thompson, the part I eventually got cast in against all of the Spider-Man candidates in screen tests. So each one would come in and I'd keep doing the scene with them and keep bullying them and, you know, whatever. And I got to meet Sam Ramey and Sam like me.

And then Sam called me back in for a specific screen test for me only and, you know, said, here's our executive producer, Grant Curtis, bully him, bully him. And I was like, get on your knees. You know, he got his knee. I started slapping him. I made him pluck like a chicken. They thought it was hilarious. And they were like, here's the casting director, Francis.

pretend she's your girlfriend, pretend she's Mary Jane. I'm like, ah, you know, I'm like hitting on the cast and doing, doing all this funny stuff. And Sam looked at my resume afterwards and he said, uh, okay, but you did go to Carnegie Mellon. Like, please, can I trust you? And you're all of what, like 21? 23, you know, 23.

And, um, but then of course, you know, going back to that for a lucky guy, you're, you're, you're pretty unlucky comment. Um, you know, two weeks after, just, you know, two weeks after, just, you know, you're, you know, Sam Ramey sends his congratulations that I was cast. My roommate comes home and says, I think my friend auditioned for your part today. I was like, that's impossible. But it was true.

The head of the studio didn't think I was all American enough looking, took it away unbeknownst to me and started auditioning other people. And that went on for like two months. And so like Christmas Eve, my agent called me back and was like, hey, you know, they didn't find anybody else. You excited? You're getting it by default. Cool.

So, you know, it was like, you're lucky because you're going to be in like the biggest movie ever attempted. And it's Spider-Man, but you're unlucky because you had to go through all this in order to get it. So anyway, that was like kind of my welcome to Hollywood deal. And then shortly after that, you know, by the time Spider-Man was premiering in theaters, I was like completely bottoming out. on drugs and alcohol yeah um it was that summer of 2002 the spider man came on theaters in may that whole summer i was like just skidding as i was like i'd get 28 days and go back out get 29 days get 30 day go out and then it took me until august 26 where of 2002 where that was day one where when did that start um the the the bottoming or no the just the the the the the the

drinking and the drugs and just the using. Yeah, I think, you know, I always felt growing up like I was born without skin. I was very empathetic. And I don't mean that in like a fucking, you know, sissy way. I mean that when I played cards as a little kid, I could tell what the adults had in their hands. I could know how they were playing. And I would beat the adults. I'd know, don't put that card down because they're going to take it because they need.

That's the one they need. way they're playing. I could sense all that, you know, I, I could tell what, you know, adults were feeling. Um, and, uh, and I think that was all a little too much for me. And I always looked at, I looked at the other kids. I looked at beer commercials. I went, how come everybody else has it so easy? And I feel so complicated. Um, I had so much like, so many storms inside me that were rumbling that I just couldn't get out. And they would always sabotage me in those great moments, you know, like the girl who's cheerleader who I really liked and her parents are out of town and she's having a party

and let's go to my room and talk. And I just want to talk about how depressed. You know what I'm like? Like in those moments where you're like, dude, just shut out. and you know it's all right there for you I couldn't never get there you know and um until you know a friend of mine I was 16 years old and I'd gotten contact lenses and it started working out and my mom was a model so I I said to her could you introduce me to somebody at the local talent agency and she said oh okay so she did and I got hired for this job it was for

Versace at the Ross Park Mall where it was me in the department store on a motorcycle with like a model hanging over me and they paid me. You know what I mean? It was like, this is great. Like, how do I do this? And then that led to one night when I was 16, a friend of mine, my agent, you know, called and said, I said, hey, somebody canceled on us last minute. Could you fill in? I don't know who else to call. I said, sure, sure. She said, well, you know, how'd you like to make 30 bucks an hour? Oh, yeah, great. She won't, we'll just come down to the office. If anybody asked, just say you're 21. Okay, great. So I had my mom drop me off. I didn't have my license yet, you know, and I walk into this room and there's all these adults.

And I said, walk into the room and they all turn, like unison. And they say, you're the guy? And I went, yep. And they went, how old are you? 21. Great, put this on. and they hand me this pirate suit and it's like the ruffles the jacket the wig the eye patch the hat the booties that go over your shoes and make them look like pirate boots and a plastic sword a got a little pistola and i'm going to be captain morgan in a bunch of bars so and they're like these are your wenches and they're like these two hot college girls and like skimpy pirate girl outfits load us into a minivan drive us to a bar i get out Pull my cape, you know, got caught in the door, whatever, get out.

And they go, oh, ho, ho, oh, you put on your backpack. They put this big tank, backpack on me. Fill it with room has a tap on it. They're like, go get everybody drunk and give them t-shirts. So we go into the bar, the two pirate girls pull me into the corner. And they're like, let's drink this. Let's go. Come on.

So we're all, you know. I mean, like by the third bar, I get that cherub. be warm feeling in my cheeks. And we get out of the mini van at the third bar and they, remember they had the cowboy doors, those saloon doors, 16 years long. I walk up, something overtakes me, boot the doors in. The whole bar looks at me and I go, again, the whole bar goes, again, it was on.

I had people laying on the bar, I'm squirting on their mouths, all these people lined up singing. Marilyn Manson covers with the band. There were like girls flashing for t-shirts, and I'm taking pictures on Seagram's camera. They gave me. I mean, it was like mayhem. I sell the knife.

I sell the gun. People offer me money. I'm selling. I'm putting the cash in my, you know, my sock. I sold the eye patch, you know, I mean, and they're like, where's your stuff? And I'm like, somebody stole it. You know, I get this sock full of cash.

The promotion ends. They drop me off. of my mom's lawn, 2.30 in the morning, I trundle in hammered. Next morning, I wake up in that agent calls and says, how to go. I went, it went great. I thought we, I thought we did some, some great work. I thought we reached a lot of people. She's like, well, there's a huge problem. Like, shit, we're all going to jail. He goes, I don't know what you did, but Seagrams doesn't want to do this promotion unless you're Captain Morgan. So we got to figure out a way to get you a fake ID. So this is this is the inception point for not only, you know, your alcoholism, but also your

acting career. You're like, you not only did you sell all that stuff. Like, and you, you, you sold the brand and you sold Captain Morgan. Like, you inhabited Captain Morgan. You became him and it was well received. Yeah. And then, you know, but also on the way home from the promotion, they were like, hey, where do you live? We'll drop you off because I was telling the girls like, yeah, I go to, I go to pit. go to the University of Pittsburgh. I'm in high school, you know, like a sophomore. And then they're like, all right, well, we'll drop you off first. We're going to head past Oakland. I go, no, no, no, drop me off last. Because I don't want to see me get dropped off in my mom's house in suburbia. So it was like this whole complex web of stories and then Captain Morgan. And then

I wound up getting, there was a guy at the agency who was 10 years older than me who looked like me. And he gave me his ID and I was Captain Morgan from 16 through 21 in Pittsburgh. And then I I got a job working for Finlandia vodka, but instead of the pirate suit, I'm wearing a tuxedo and the girls were wearing evening gowns. And we traveled the world on U2's old tour bus full of vodka, drunk, smoking Marlboro Reds. I get a lung infection from the Marlboro Reds and drinking all day. So I have to leave the tour early, get rid of the lung infection, get a job working for

camel, passing out cigarettes at all the bars, which made all of Pittsburgh a giant open bar. Like I just figured out how to monetize my favorite things to do. Yeah, the Pittsburgh pitchman for everything addictive and not good for you. And you must have been like a manchild, though. Were you like huge when you were 16? How are you passing for 20? I mean, I'm heavier now, but I was 6.5 when I was 16 years old.

So I was always taller than the other kids, but I topped off at 16. So, yeah, I mean, I looked, I looked the part. I could pass. Nobody questioned me. And you're a three sport athlete at the time. Yes. Football, basketball, volleyball. You're doing it all.

That's like, that's like an ego thing too. Like, oh, I can go do all this other stuff and be this athlete. Well, I had the secret, I was a secret life. Yes. Not for nothing. Yeah. Well, and then I made my own movies. Right.

So that started happening. But, but yeah, no, I, I was living a secret life away from high school, you know, which made high school really boring. Because on the weekends, Captain Morgan with college girls. and now I have to come back and go to my, you know, stupid classes. But I started making my own movies and that became interesting and AP physics became less interesting. And then I just started figuring out like, okay, like through the movies, through the, you know,

assorted promotional jobs and things like, I just like, I can do this. I know that I could be an actor. I know my friends who I'm shooting movies with, they keep pushing me that way. And so I finally start taking theater classes my senior year. And right away, the theater teacher was like, will you please try out for the musical? Like, do not to sing and dance? She's like, yes, you do.

But you're gonna be fine. I was like, okay. And so I did and then tried out for Carnegie Mellon right out of high school with all the other theater kids who had been doing it their whole lives. And I didn't get in, but I didn't know what I was doing. And so I spent a year. I didn't apply anywhere else, and I late applied to the University of Pittsburgh, went there, spent a year just busting my ass. And then a year later, to the date, walked across the street on a snowy morning and tried out again.

And that time, I was one of 16 actors that got in. So the part that broke my heart was all of that fight, all of that threading the needle at 100 yards that it took for me. to jump those tracks, give up everything that sports and academics were going to provide for me, that straight and narrow path. I made it. Somehow I jumped and grabbed the other side. And then alcoholism just neutralized all that. And, you know, heading into three years of sobriety, I'm working on the back of a construction truck. I have no agent, no manager. No one will return my phone calls. I have nothing. And I'm shoveling sand and gravel from seven to four every day with a bunch of guys

don't speak English and hauling cement bags and in the LA sun wondering like am I going back to school or what am I doing? Like it took away all my dreams. And I never thought I was going to get that back at that point. And I thought I'm just going to be Joe and I'm going to be sober and I'm going to figure this out. And I thought maybe this was punishment for my ego being involved with being an actor, whatever all that was.

But there were enough people who were fans of my work and knew what I was capable of that kept calling. And then I started getting traction and jobs started happening. And then I got off the construction truck and never went back. So by the time we hit True Blood, I'm in a position where I've now gotten the break. Like True Blood was a break. True Blood was a pocket ace's hand job. It was the hottest show in the world.

It was a star making type of show that the industry watched like all the directors, Everybody watched True Blood, one of, you know, those first few seasons. And I was going to be the hot, big new character on the show. And I knew it. And so that really took away all the pain of sobriety, all the things that I thought I was going to that I thought would never come back to me, came back. It's like, all of a sudden I'm getting calls to be in movies. I'm getting calls, you know, Superman, Hercules.

I'm getting, you know, all the big parts. I can't do them all because I'm shooting True Blood, but I have gainful employment. It's still great artistically and I can start figuring out what I want to do once I get off. And as I'm in that process of wrapping up true blood, I become engaged, start dating, become engaged to and get married to, I think one year there was like, I was the hottest guy on TV, she was the hottest girl on TV.

So it was like, oh, this makes total sense. and, you know, everything was on the up and up. There was going to be a Magic Mike sequel. They were centering more of the plot around me. I was getting calls for action movies. Like all of these things, like huge showrunners were calling me, telling me they were going to develop shows for me, like award worthy material.

And all of this is happening. And then all of a sudden I start not feeling right. my skin, there's something going on. I have like multiple rashes. I just chalk it up to maybe not doing my laundry quick enough or, or, you know, taking my workout gear off when I get out of the, I don't know what's going on. And then all of a sudden the blood starts. And once the blood starts, something's wrong.

But I'm also like two months away from getting married. So are we calling this off? No. No. No, no. no, no, no, no, we're not calling it. No, no, no, keep moving, keep moving forward. And by the time we got back from the honeymoon, I didn't feel great. And by the time we got back, I had to go in and have a procedure done, and I was misdiagnosed.

And it was the wrong procedure. And then after that, I didn't heal from it. And I laid on my side for about a month and a half. and during that time Harvey Weinstein pitched me a TV series at my wedding to star in this show and he said he was going to run Miami campaign for me

and you're the next thing and this and that you know and when before his incarceration at Rikers Island for sexual assault and rape having Harvey Weinstein in your corner that's it you're made man and I go off to shoot that show and my body starts being overtaken by bobbous weeping hives.

Like something's wrong. Like the makeup team had to start like spray painting over these open weeping sort, like all over me. I'm waking up and pulls a sweat. I'm bleeding all night long in the bathroom. I'm getting up like every 20 minutes, bleeding in mass. amounts of pain. And finally one day on set, I couldn't do it anymore. And I laid down in the fetal position, in the dirt. And I locked up and I couldn't move. And I couldn't come. I got back to

my trailer and I kept saying, you know, shoot the other scene. Shoot the other scene. And they started shooting. They said, we're done with the other scene hours later. And I couldn't move. And they finally, they called an ambulance. And then that kicked off. You know, an eight-week, eight-week hospital stay in which all of it just exploded. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We are in the stretch of the year where people take inventory. And if you're anything like the folks who write to me consistently, there's a thing that you've been carrying around stuffed in your back pocket.

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That's so intense, man. And not knowing what it is. Like the fear of not even being able to put your hands around like what exactly is happening so that you can get it treated properly. And I was in masking it. Like there's so much to lose. Like I got to get through the shoot or like nobody can know, you know, if they find out, I'm going to lose this job or the show is going to fall apart.

Yeah. And my tendency is just you just, you know, you just fight through it. Warrior mode. Yeah. I've worked with the flu before. You know, I've worked with a 104 degree temperature. Like, you just, you power through it. And, yeah, those first two weeks in the hospital in North Carolina, I mean, there was a

parade of, like, doctors and interns. And, like, they were bringing into the room because I was, I was like, John Merrick. I'm like, the elephant man to them. Like, we can't figure out. Nothing's showing up in any of the scans. Look at up, you know, and like, pull your pants down, show up. Like, I mean, it was like that where you're just like you feel like you're some kind of lab experiment with this parade of people. And finally it was like, get out of my room.

Like, leave me alone. You know, and it was at that point that I had an airlift back. I had to, you know, airlift back to Cedars in L.A. Because I knew I'm not getting out here anytime soon. And paparazzi were swarming. It had broken that that I had shut down the production. They had to recast the role. They were trying to figure out where I was.

There were people sitting vigil outside of our house in L.A. waiting to try to get pictures of me. And then, you know, like had to say something to get these people off of me. And so we said that my appendix ruptured or I had to have my appendix out, which technically wound up not being completely untrue. Right. They took everything else out. Yeah, I mean, it's down there, it's infected, it's got to go.

Yeah, just say, hey, my appendix exploded until we could figure out what was going on. Just get them off your back. It's the tour canceled due to dehydration or exhaustion. Yeah, exhaustion. Yeah, to go in some facility for re-for exhaustion. Right, just like, you know, kind of coded language. Yes. Yeah.

And so came back to L.A., and then that's when the 10th, tests really ramped up because they couldn't figure out what was going on. And by at this point also to, you know, 13 and a half years sober and I'm completely dependent upon liquid dilaudid, which for anybody out there who has done liquid dilated, if you ever want to put on VR goggles and pretend that you're in a Simpsons episode, this is for you. This is the drug for you. Yeah. I mean, you know, hence ensues this relationship with this disease and all the pharmaceuticals that are being thrown at you, that, you know, you've got to figure out how to take or not take.

And the threat that that poses to your sobriety and the fear that you have about it activating your inner addict and, you know, all of the kind of internal conflict and turmoil that goes on with that. Like, what does this mean for my sobriety? Is it going to wake the beast up and I'm not going to get a bit? back and it's going to, I know that destroyed my life. And it was so difficult to get it in the cage. And now this thing's going to come out again. And immediately your brain starts wrestling with, not wrestling, but you start having those thoughts of like, you know, kind of developing a tolerance to this and you start trying to negotiate with the nurses. You're like, you know, what's your pain level, Joe, today? I'm sure you, I'm sure you, this was prescribed for an 80-year-old.

old 80-pound woman. I'm sure it was. But I am giant. I need more. Can you give me, you know, you start doing that talk. And that's the thing. It's the thing trying to get out, trying to get more, trying to get more, it's allotted. Like, they gave me morphine at one point. I couldn't even feel it. It was like nothing. It was like, you give me an aspirin. It didn't matter. Yeah, dilaudits is a good shit. Crazy. And I had to, in my spine surgery, I was on that for a minute. It's also completely brutal staring at the clock because the clock becomes that thing where you know how long until they won't give it to you for four hours. Yeah. So right around hour three you're like and then it's like right at the four hour mark or you or then you go

no, I usually take some 15 minutes to get in here. So all right, I'm going to hit it at 345. And then and then And, you know, soon enough, it's like an hour in, and you're like staring at the clock for the next three hours. And that went on for another six weeks in the hospital in L.A. as they ran me through every gamut of test. And, you know, there's a moment where, like, I know it's over. Like, I can't do it another night. Like, I know it. Like, my stomach, I would feel it swell up. and I know what was filling with blood.

Like, I would just feel my abdomen swell. And I would get my stand and try to get into the bathroom in time. And sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And it was usually in the middle of the night. And it was just an explosion. I mean, imagine little of the night. Just explosion of blood in your stool. Yeah.

Just blood. The whole stool is blood. Nothing but blood. It's just blood. And you're in there, trying to be quiet because your wife that you just got married to you're supposed to be on a you know in the honeymoon phase with is out there trying to get some sleep on a cot and so you're in there you know silently like you want to scream at the top of your lungs but you have to get

down and start scrubbing this blood up so that she doesn't walk in there and see a murder scene and lose her mind and so there's a part of you that you're the one this is happening to but you have to leave, well, a large part of yourself to try to manage somebody else's potential trauma while it's happening to you. There's a part of me that still has to care for everybody else who has to, I have to go through it, but they have to watch me go through it and they're powerless. And so, you know, there was a night where I was in there that happened and I was in there cleaning the blood up out of the tile grout, you know? And I, um, I, I saw, stood up, I had to hold on to the sink to stand up. So I was starting to drop weight at this point.

And my skin looked like it was paper like it was see-through. It was like the veins, like it was like a gray blue. My lips were blue and it was like I was see-through. And, you know, I just, I looked in the mirror and I looked like, you know, I was so emaciated. I looked like a zombie. And I thought, you're not going to make it one more day. Like, look at all this blood. Like, you don't have more. Like, I knew I was going to die. Like, this is it.

It's over. I don't know what's going on. They can't figure it out. I don't remember the next series of events, but, you know, I went back out to bed and tried to lay down. And the next thing I remember is waking up. And Sophia was at the foot of the bed, and she had to tell me that they, they, brought me into an emergency surgery that morning.

Like my, my, my, you know, my vitals were just crazy. And so they, they went in and they had to split me open. And, uh, they found that my large intestine was pus. The whole, it was a bag of pus. It was ready to explode. And that's what I was feeling. And that's what was swelling up. It was like the first stages of, you know, I mean, it was, it was like, I would have gotten septic and then that's it. And, um, they had to call here while I was out.

and present her with the choices of what she thought I would want. And as my, you know, next of kin, she had to decide. And the choice was between what and what? Leave it in there. I don't know what the second choice was, but the third choice was to remove the large intestine entirely and leave me with potentially a permanent ostomy bag, which I then lived with after that. And so, you know, I wake up in that bed and she had to inform me that they had to split you open. Your large intestines gone. And you have

an osmany bag. And I mean, I was so drugged out. I'm waking up. And I remember putting my hand down and feeling this plastic ring in this bag. And it was like, whatever you thought your life was, was it's over. Like, it's over, man. Like, thank God they found out what was wrong, but God knows what this all means now because they also didn't figure out what was wrong because there was still ulceration all the way down. My skin had another autoimmune condition, like a really serious one that was causing all those open weeping sores. My lungs and my eyes were starting to go through it. And then my thyroid. had stopped working properly.

So it was like, yeah, they didn't, they didn't discover what was wrong. They basically dealt with the acute downstream impact of this mysterious thing that was happening to you. They bought me time. They just, they bought time. Like when the Germans are moving into Russia and Russia is dismantling the, the factories that make weapons and ammunition because the Germans are taking them over and they're putting them on their trains and they just keep moving them east as the German front keeps moving.

And now they're assembling these weapons in snowstorms because they don't have roofs over their heads. And then the Germans keep moving and they keep moving it to just try to buy time. That's what happened. It was the removing of the of the, the intestine didn't stop the Germans. It didn't stop the war. It didn't stop the moving forward. It just kept, it's like we had to give it up in order to buy time to hopefully maybe figure this out. I didn't know that you could live without a large intestine. Me neither. Yeah.

And just for context, like the extreme nature of this situation, in addition to the extreme nature of the acute condition, you being this, you know, handsome leading man, marries this beautiful woman, you're beginning your marriage. And we're like, you're like, you're trying to have a family also. Yeah, like you're trying. I mean, we're working on having kids before we were even engaged. Like, that was why we got married. It was like, we're going to have kids.

We're going to have a family. That was the whole talk from the beginning. And now it's like, I don't know if I'm going to be alive the next week. And the ultimate expression of like male virility and strength and health and vitality, right? Like this sort of public perception of you, you know, like best physique in Hollywood. Like all of that at the same time, like the juxtaposition of the reality that you were facing. versus like, you know, how kind of the public knew of you. Yeah, I mean, regardless of, you know, whatever marginalization I felt about being looked

by, you know, he's the dumb hunky guy or whatever it is. Yeah, annoying, but like, I'll take that over what I'm dealing with right now. Yeah, well, I mean, in that moment, it all comes rushing in that, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger, I used to say, you know, your abs are fantastic. They're better than mine ever wear, and you have incredible abs and look at this guy. And he pulled my shirt up, look at this, you know. It's over, like it's done.

There's a 50 cent size piece whole in your abdomen and your small intestine is pointing out of it now. And you have a giant scar up the front with Frankenstein staples. Like, that's over, man. And there is a fear about that when you know that's how you made a living. So your brain is now trying to go into, trying to process the new information and find this new center of gravity or, or, you know, but it's like you just want a future trip.

So, I mean, I don't want to say, I don't want to say thank God for dilauded, but I mean, there was, there was a bit of it where it was just like, I was so drugged out of my mind that I couldn't even really fully grasp what was happening to me. And that bought you time to adapt emotionally. Well, but I didn't really adapt emotionally until the reconnection attempt, which is, you know, we're kind of skipping a chunk of the story where, you know, the first chapter of the book, the first chapter of the book starts out with me in Monaco. I wind up after all of these surgeries and all these catheters and, you know, a tube snaked up my nose down to pump shit in a bucket next to the bed because my body would stop produce processing food and I I lost the ability to walk I went cross-eyed I because my my muscles

and my eyes couldn't hold my eyes in place I was that week I had bed sores I was sticking I was having seizures I mean it was just mayhem chaos and but I get out of the hospital I get two good days together after eight eight weeks and they like let me out. And I start trying to gain the weight back. I start trying to learn how to like tell my brain to stand up and sit down because it won't. There's something blocking the mind connection. And I have to start really working hard on walking and sitting up and standing now. And I get a call that Ben Affleck wants to meet me to stars the villain in Batman. And I'm like, why is this happening now. Why couldn't this have been the call you've been waiting for your whole life?

It's like James Bond, Batman, Batman villain, and they're never going to let an American be bond. So it's like, you're the Batman or a Batman villain or something. To me, Batman villain is almost more interesting. And it's like, this is the role of my life. And I'm on liquid, I'm undelotted. Well, at the time, I'm at home now. I'm on pill dilauded. I'm in dilauded. I can hardly stand up and sit down. I'm trying to gain weight back. And here's the biggest job of your life. Can you work one day next month and then six months next year? Okay. Because what do I do? I say yes. Show up. So I put on long sleeves. I spent six days detoxing from the dilated pills, which was six days of sleeplessness, suicidal ideation, crying out of nowhere, sweating uncontrollably.

but I knew the deal. I knew what that was going to be like so that I could drive a car under my own power and go meet Ben. And week later, email for my agents late at night, like London time. You got the part. They want you for this villain

role and you need to get to Heathrow to London next week. So I fly by myself to Heathrow, to London. And on the way, I had a bag leak on the plane in the dark, which I describe in the book. And then I land and I have to go into a costume fitting that I know about. What's your pain level at this time? It's not, I'm not in pain so much at this point

because they've diverted my entire system. like you know I have a bag on my on the front of my abdomen so it's like they're diverting through that that that's part of the system that was severely ulcerated I'm very uncomfortable I have multiple skin issues going on at once you must have lost a ton of weight at this point well I gained 40 pounds of it back in the first month I was home. How do you do that without a large intestine? Because I'm a maniac.

Yeah. No, I mean, I know how to be uncomfortable from being an addict. And you know how to try to get one over on other people. I know how to. Which is kind of what you got to do with Ben. And Ben doesn't strike me as somebody who suffers fools lightly. Like, he's a very smart guy. Like, so when you're sitting across from him, how are you convincing him that you're up

to the job. Well, I'm also very disciplined, you know. My father was a very disciplined guy, and I got all of that. And so I knew how to get home. You're not going to ask, why me. You're going to hire a chef, and you're going to tell this guy to feed you every 60 to 90 minutes, 30 to 40 grams of protein, the way you know how, your body can process that much. You're not going to miss one input. You're going to put your head down. You're going to eat boxes full of gluten-free donuts because I didn't know gluten was going to hurt me. So I'm just crushing these boxes, shakes, everything that I could get in, which meant that the bag is outputting like 24 hours a day, which is a lot of work and a pain. Because you got to keep getting up and getting up and

getting up because your body's just processing. And then I would practice when I had to take my I would take my pain pills and work out so that I could try to shock my muscles into putting weight on to just grow some kind of weight back. Just sheer force of self-will to like make this happen. After a month I gained back 40 of the 60 pounds. And then I had another, so when I went to go meet Ben, I wore a long-sleeved shirt to hide that I lost weight and to hide the other. 20 pounds, which, okay, we're kind of ballpark. And then in the next month or so,

a month and a half I put on the other 20 to get back up to somewhat normal, but I would keep battling that for, for years. It would just, I mean, I would, I was, I was getting strong just for the next attack that would just drill me to the ground and then would have to get back up and get strong again enough to go back down again. And, um, but you know, I, I, I, I, I land in Heathrow and, and I go to my hotel outside of London near the studio and, uh, and I know I have a costume fitting tomorrow, so I have to stop eating or else the bag is going to output because I know they're going to put the super suit on me, which is skin tight and multiple layers. And if I eat anything, going in the suit,

it's going to pop. can't so I stop eating 18 hours before it's planned out like a bag wrong yeah all right you know it's like a I'm planning a heist okay you're gonna stop being okay great all right so we get in there and uh you know they hand me the first spandex layer and I kind of they all they're all standing there as I'm holding this layer and I just want uh like hey you all gonna stand there or kind of I'm playing demure you know naked werewolf is you know big dick richie from magic mic I'm I'm I'm shy about getting undressed you know like but what are you going to do you know what I mean I was like kind of basing this on what I thought people pushing

people into a position that you know they left me alone oh oh sorry sorry sorry so they all left put the base layer on okay everybody come on okay good now that first layer's on bags kind of hidden underneath there. Now we'll put the armor on. Now we'll get the layer next layer on. We'll start putting the pieces on. Great. Get the costume fitting down. Okay, good. Okay, great. Now you need to go over because we're going to do a full body 3D scan to make the mannequin so we can work on your armor while you're gone. So you need to go and you're going to get shot in the round by 256 cameras. What? Yeah, and it's in your underwear. We notice you're wearing black underwear and the cameras don't like black so why don't you put these on and they have me these tiny little like banana

hammock blue baby blue briefs that like look like they wouldn't have fit a child let alone me and they're not could cover the bag i mean it's the whole it was like but this is your penalty for wearing the wrong underwear now you have to wear our weird you know and i started panicking but i had had i had gone to the crossfit games like i'm somewhere during that summer I'd, you know, made somebody else drive and went to the CrossFit games with the bag on pain kills, killers to be a spectator. And I had a leak while I was there. But I had brought an extra pair of shorts.

So I was in the habit of bringing extra shorts with me. And I had an extra pair in my bag. And I was like, these are gray. Can I wear these? These are mine? And they said, yeah, gray's fine. So put the gray ones on. I go, I have to get up on this platform in the middle of 256 cameras.

There's a guy up in the booth. And he's like, your underwear line is a little high. Can you pull it down? You're just not going to get out of this. So I do the old pull them up super high and then put him right back to the same spot. And he's, you know, there's a grown man who's not going to argue with me about how I like to hold my underwear line. So he's like, okay, fine.

Like, lets it go. Okay. Take all the pictures. Great. Okay, great. There's a car outside. It's going to take you to your physical. Yeah.

Just the volume. Like, the burner is just getting turned up on you, you know. Physical. The heat. Right. The physical. We haven't had the physical yet to get bonded, of course. I mean, what made you think that ultimately,

if even you got away with all these. things that this wasn't going to come out and explode in your face at some point anyway. But it's just like, what are you going to do? You got to go for it. In my mind, I thought if I work one day next month, all I have to do is get to the one day. And then I'll figure out what's going to happen next. I'm going to get reconnected. This thing's going to leave me. I'm going to be okay. This wouldn't have come my way. If it wasn't meant to be or it wasn't a sign that fate was knocking and saying this is the next step. I mean, mind you, my wife is like livid that I said yes and took this thing, you know,

but I needed it. Not because I need to be a movie star. You know what I mean? All of that career stuff. I need it. I need something to force me into fighting with everything that I have. You know, I have a friend of mine who, Ryan Shazier, he played for the Steelers, and he got paralyzed

in a football game against the Bengals. And we used to talk after every game, and he was a friend of mine, you know, and I watched this happen to him. And coming out of that, he would say things like, I'm gonna play again. And the doctors are like, you're not gonna walk again. He's like, no, I'm gonna play.

You watch, I'm gonna play. There's a period of time when, after he has, you know, after a serious, you know, you probably know, serious spinal injury where, you know, for him, where it was, the severity of it, that there was a crucial period of development for him, right from the time of the impact or past surgery to where if he was ever going to walk again, then he was going to have to work during this period. So setting a goal beyond what you think or what everybody else is telling you you're capable of is necessary for people like me, people like him that are going

through some sort of traumatic occurrence like that. You have to put the finish line way further beyond what you think you're capable of, what everybody else around you is telling you're capable of. And he's had to say to himself, I'm going to, I'm not only going to walk again, I'm going to play football again, which we were all like, don't. Like, just, you know, the point is I went to his wedding and watched him walk down the island dance all night. Wow. And he can play with his kids. He didn't ever play again. Of course. Yeah. But that outrageous, it's part, it's part denial, but it's self-preservation, like hanging your hat on like some audacious goal to anchor you and get you out of bed every morning and give you direction and purpose and something to work

towards. My job isn't questioning this or why it's come my way. My job is just to grab onto it and go. grab the train and go this train is coming it's not going to come again go because it's going to take you it might not take you where you hope it's going to take you but that's not your job to think about that your job is just to put every ounce that you have into your rehabilitation process gaining that weight back getting strong enough lowering your inflammation enough so that when they attempt to reconnect it's the best situation possible because those things don't always work. But I'm not thinking about all that.

I'm just thinking about what I need to do to get as healthy as possible to shoot this giant six-month action movie in a year from now. And I needed that. Everybody knows what happened. Batman got canceled. And I never, I mean,

I got to play the character again for like two minutes in the reshoots. And for the next six years, they were just project after project and call for my agent after call for my agent about, oh yeah, they're going to use your character in this. You're going to be in this. You're going to be the villain in Aquaman 2. You're going to be the suicide squad too with this director. No, now this director. No, now you versus Will Smith. Oh, it's going to be a standalone. Oh, it's going to be it was there. Again, am I lucky or unlucky? I'm lucky that I got that part. But at the time,

I felt like I was unlucky because I got this thing that then got came to me. canceled and went away. So I'm like, how unlucky am I? I feel like I'm cursed. I get this thing. It gives me hope and now it's gone. And then all these other projects are now gone. But looking back, I was lucky that that thing came my way. That thing, like, if it wasn't for that, that role, I don't, I don't know that the reconnection works. I don't know that I'm healthy enough. I don't know that I gain that weight back. I don't know that I can walk. I don't know that I can function in the way that I do now. I don't know that mentally I'm in as good of a place as I am now.

That role, I have the helmet in my office. And it's a greatest accomplishment in my life, this bank heist that I'm describing. And what I had to do to try to shoot that one day in Monaco, which I did. And mind you, the morning of the shoot in Monaco, I mean, I'm covered in hives, covered like I was when I was shooting that hard. Harvey Weinstein show and everything but my face.

And it's the only thing you need to see in the shot. And I go and I do my don't eat for 18 hours because you're going to put the suit back on. And I go and I shoot in like 90 degree weather with this, you know, four layers on. And as soon as I get back to my hotel, my whole face is covered. And I started having to wear like a wide brim hat after that for months because of, it's like my, my body was holding off this allergic reaction to this drug, this, you know, biologic drug just long enough. It held it off long enough for me to shoot the scene and then took over. This episode is brought to you by Airbnb.

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outbreak and you know you would have destroyed trust with everybody in the industry they would have had to recast you in the middle like there were all these other people involved in this so on some level it's a very selfish end you know like you're going to put yourself in this situation where you're creating risk for and and you know there's a lot of dollars on the line and jobs and all that kind of stuff so you were spared yes that situation you were given this new lease on life this sense of agency purpose direction and then you had that year to like like build upon that and and try to figure out what was wrong with you and set yourself up for this reconnection. Yes. And the point I was kind of getting to, which I'm glad you, you know,

you kind of wrote the back in was, you know, I really started dealing with the emotional fallout after the reconnection. Because up until the reconnection, I had Batman. I had, I had something to look forward to something to fight for. And I had enough enough. going for me in my life or enough hope that I could live in this veil of denial. I had enough denial. And once I got reconnected, it was like all of a sudden it hit me what happened to me. Like all of a sudden, all of the trash in the back of the station wagon, you know, that I'd been throwing, I'd just been just doggedly fighting.

Now it's like you hit the brakes and it's, wham, slams into the windshield. It was all of a sudden I started having like real emotional. issues because I started realizing this is happening. This is happening to you. This happened to you. It's didn't happen to somebody else. And then when Batman got canceled, it's over. Like it's over. It's done. And now you just have you. And you don't even have that to look forward to. And you have to take down the scaffolding for that building you were building where you were going to go off and be the Batman villain. And even though you're going through all of this, you were going to have your thing to hang your hat on and your life is going to move forward.

Now it's like, it's over and you got nothing except to sit here and think about what's next. And none of the drugs were working. I mean, it was like, that was brutal. That was a brutal, brutal, period. It's a limited series with a lot of episodes. Yeah, first episode second. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it just keeps, I mean, that's, and that's the first, we're now hitting the end of the first chapter of the book.

That's, that's, that's all of that is encapsulated. But this is the catalyst and the setup. for like this exploration. Like this is where the Odyssey really begins. Yeah. In terms of like you're on this search to figure out what's wrong with you, how to fix it. And it takes you to some pretty crazy places.

You know, it's like a fucking, like a coming out party. Yeah. Putting the book out. Because I lived for 10 years afraid to talk about all that stuff that went on, you know. Um, you know, I, uh, you know, once I, I, I tried to make death stroke happen. I'm, I'm in a very shaky moral high ground. Or I wouldn't even call it high ground. I mean, I'm in shaky moral territory because I'm, I'm trying to show up for work again. Mm-hmm.

I don't know if I'm tricking myself into thinking that I could do all of those things that I tried to do. Certainly, everybody else in my life thought I had no business attempting to try to make Batman work. But I don't, there's no way I was gonna say no, there's no way. Yeah, it's an interesting conundrum because in sobriety, it's all about bursting the veil of denial. It's all about like, how do you transcend denial? And in your situation and in moments of crisis, like we have this denial mechanism for a reason. There's a survival aspect to it.

Oh yeah. And so in your case, like denial served a very important purpose in keeping you directional, keeping you alive, giving you a reason to get out of bed. So it's not as binary or as simple. And, you know, in the context of you being a sober person, we get sober, we work the steps, we go to meetings, we're of service to, you know, the newcomer, all of it, right? And it's all about transcending fear. It's about having a healthy relationship with your past.

So you're not haunted by it. You're not like, you know, a victim of guilt and shame and all of these things that take us back to drinking and using. It's about unveiling, like taking the mask off, right? And here you are in a situation where in order to survive, you're adopting, you're stepping back into a double life. You have to put this mask on. And you have to be duplicitous in some regard, which is antithetical to the principles of sobriety. And you're trying to stay sober. Like, are you bringing this to your guy? Like, are you sharing about this in meetings? Are you keeping locked up about this? Is this even something you don't even feel comfortable talking about with your people? Yeah, no. And like, what's going on with your marriage? Like, you know, this is threatening your sobriety and just your whole way of life. Yes. But you're needing to do it because this is the only way that you can see a way forward for yourself. And so that has to, you know, like that, that burden, like on some level, even if somewhat unconscious has to be like weighing on you at the

same time, all of this is going on. No, that's like, yeah, you nailed it. Like all of it. Like, I mean, you're supposed to be rigorously honest. But there's a limit. Well. Yeah. It's you're being tested, you know, in such a profound way.

But in a way, when I got sober and was about three or so you're sober, I remember going to fill an apartment application and there was a question have you ever been evicted and i knew that if i wrote yes i'm never going to get it and and furthermore i'm never going to get anything and i'm just going to be in a situation where i have to be like the third roommate you know in some apartment where there's a bong on the coffee table i know because i had been looking endlessly for months you know and try to find the right points and i remember talking to a buddy mine in aa i was like dude Am I mining? Yes. Can I get a pass on this one?

And he said, you're not that person anymore. And I wrote no. And I got it. And that landlord made a smart decision letting me rent that apartment because I was the perfect tenant. And I have always been the perfect tenant since then. So there's a point where is there a different way to look at it? And there's also, you know, I've also spent eight months and a half. hospital or eight, sorry, eight weeks in a hospital. I spent eight weeks not two months,

eight weeks in a hospital. Like, I was dead. Like, I mean, as close to death as you can get. And now I'm back on this side of the line. And, you know, I remember my mother saying to me, you know, when I was in the hospital with, with a tube snake down my throat to pump the shit into the bucket and I couldn't walk. And she said, you know, pray to God to get you out of this. God will help you out of this. And I said, you know, with this tube, you know, the same God that gave this to me. And I stopped praying.

I didn't, I didn't want to hear answers. I wasn't meditating. I wasn't doing any of it. I wasn't journaling. I wasn't writing. I didn't want to, like, it was like Old Testament God. Yeah, I was going to say, it's biblical. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'm getting hit by a plague. You know, like, and so I'm not saying that that's an excuse for what I was. I just was in my own mind. Why would this come my way if I couldn't do it? Yeah. And an adage in the rooms is like God doesn't give you anything you can't handle. One day.

I need to shoot one day next month. Let's go. Let's go. like having the faith that it's all going to work out and well it's one day at a time like i just have to do this one thing today yes whatever happens tomorrow i'll deal with that tomorrow and i'll be prepared for whatever comes in my direction once you know once once once once once i had the Reconnection surgery and then Batman got canceled, it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, no.

This isn't going anywhere. Like, it was when that hit me that I went through all of that for nothing, but it wasn't for nothing. It just, I couldn't see, I couldn't see it at the time. I was too close to it. I was still in the middle of it all. I just, it was that process. That was really one the press, well, when the. the process really kicked up to another notch of, of, um, what was it going to take to get me

to surrender everything, everything I'd worked for my entire life up to that point. And, uh, so I just, you know, anything I touched started turning the dust into my hands. That, that's when it got hard because that's when I had been trying to ignore God or ignore the greater reasoning of why this was happening. And that started the process of like, it started pulling my fingers off. Let go. Let go. The job isn't going to, you're not going to get this job and spring back. There's something else going. There's something deeper. You, you, you aren't there yet. You haven't seen it for what it is yet. I was just trying to hang on in my old life. This, this sort of in the biblical analogy, like wailing at God, like haven't I surrendered enough?

like sobriety is about surrender and it's this process of realizing like there's layers to surrender like you think you have but you're still holding onto this identity or you know and and it's that Buddhist idea of like you know whatever you have an attachment to is going to create suffering and you know if you want to make God laugh like tell them your plans and like you despite all of the surrender that had preceded that with you know your sobriety journey and all these you know like reckoning with this disease realizing like you're still holding on to something and you're being asked to let go of fucking everything. I'm still holding on a lot. And that's where it brings us back to like Odysseus, you know, this is like, you know, archetypal storytelling shit. Well, and that's the thing. It's like,

okay, so Batman gets canceled. There's, there's a, there's a, and it's literally about wearing masks. Totally. Well, that's the other thing too. Yeah. I mean, I, I am wearing a mask, but. And protective armor. Yes. And, but I, I am. I'm living a compound lie. I'm not sharing about it fully. I mean, you know, there's an A-A meeting at my house on Saturdays where I invite my sponsees because I couldn't leave the house. And so other people started coming and kind of trusted people.

And I start trying to share as honestly as I can in those meetings, but I still, I'm so confused about what's going on. I'm not talking about it in the press. Are you seeing a therapist or anybody that you're opening up to? Are you being honest with your wife? Well, she knew. But her stance was to play a character. Like, she didn't tell all these people in her family.

So we'd go on family vacation, which I was trying to do. I was trying to keep up like appearances. Yeah. But I'm getting skinnier and people are starting to make comment on that. like in nasty ways and the jobs falling through my fingers, the entertainment industry starts referring to me as her husband, not by my name. So like things, again, like chipping away at the ego,

letting go of the identity of like you're not, you're not your own person anymore. You're just this sick patient. I mean, in my mind, sick patient. But we're going on vacation, I'd go out in the sun for 30 minutes. And because of the drugs, I'm on, my skin fries off. And then I can't go out for the rest of the vacation. You know, it was like,

You're just being fully dismantled. Well, and then family members are like, you know, trying to give me tips on tanning. You know what I mean? Like I'm like a 40-year-old man. Like I know and I'm Sicilian. Sicilian, yeah. I know how to tanning. I know about tanning.

We invented tanning, man. You know what do you talking about? We invented tanning. Yeah. You know, and so it's like, but they don't know the full story. And like, because when I was in the hospital, everything was on lockdown. Everybody was instructed, do not say a thing, do not say a word. People weren't coming to visit me.

It was like only a handful of people came to visit me. You know, Arnold wanted to come visit me in the hospital once. And I said, no. Because I was like, if he comes in, they're going to know I'm here and they're going to know where I am. And you had done this movie with him and he had become a friend and kind of a mentor to you. Yeah, yeah. He was a good friend. And so, you know, I'm in the situation where family, friends don't know.

the press doesn't know i don't know who to trust i'm worried about shutting down another production i'm trying to get clear of this thing or get enough i'm trying to get well so that i can say this is just a bump in a run all that dissonance is contributing to you know making the problem the disease worse right yeah it's brutal because now i'm repressing how i feel i'm not truly talking and and at the time so you ask you know am i talking to my guy Talking to my guy, but my, my guy doesn't have the capacity to understand and have a conversation with me where I think sobriety for me was like a bachelor's degree. And I think going to Al-Anon and like quantum physics relationship seminars afterwards where kind of master's degree, like you're sober. Now how do you get emotionally sober?

How can you be in a relationship with somebody else? I didn't get a great model of like what a healthy relationship looks like, which put me in a difficult position where I always did well in that department. I knew how to get her, but I didn't know how to be in a healthy relationship. I didn't have a model for a healthy relationship. My parents never got along from the time I was little. I never saw them hug, kiss, say, I love you. but then you think oh because i'm i can go out to a club or a bar and i know how to talk or

you know i know what i'm doing and it's like you don't know what you're doing you don't bait the hook and land the fish but then how you know then what do you do yeah yeah and and that was a hard thing to admit i think as a man because so much of your self-worth is wrapped up in your prowess in that department so it was like hey but i was so terrified that that that they would find out that I wasn't who they thought that I was. And so you went shoving people away before they find out or, you know what I mean? It was that game that shove away, that neon sign saying, leave me alone or, you know, come here, go away, come here, go away.

So, you know, this illness is called an avoidant, an avoidant attachment disorder. Right, yeah, like, well, and also you know- Now we're talking my language. Well, now you know you can honeymoon for the rest of your life, but you don't want that. You don't need that. You can keep it on a low boil, but you can't go all in. Well, and I would go all in every time.

I mean, I was just like, right to the edge of the cliff. What happened last time? Let's see if we can fix it now. And it's like, you're in the same spot. But there's a difference between the fix-it mentality and like true intimacy, like allowing yourself to be vulnerable to the core with your life partner. Yeah.

Or with your sober brethren. Well, and just learning how to stay no matter what until you can't anymore. And learning how to detach with love. And if you can't detach with love, then you detach with a fucking machete. But you get out of there before you say something that's going to rattle around and somebody's head forever. You know, you just stop. Don't do more damage.

Get out of the room for everybody's sake before a fight starts. Like if you feel that, just don't. Don't go there. You have to learn how to like cohabitate. You have to learn how to put other people's needs ahead of yours. You know, I would, I've, once I got sober, I was never in a relationship with somebody where I tried to get them to do something that I wanted to do. If it's like, here's the offer.

You are free to say no to any of that. And then you can slide it back across the table and, you know, but it was like, you know, I always knew I wanted kids and I want a family because I wanted to write the things that I didn't get growing up. And I wanted to be a great dad. And so if I was ever with somebody, even casually, who I knew wanted a relationship and I didn't, then I would have that talk with them and go the other way or at least give them the option of not having having to be with me if I, you know, and that was certainly true with my marriage. I mean, all the conversations in the beginning

were about having children, having a family. And if she wasn't okay with that or she was done, she had an older kid, if she was done and didn't, you know, been there, done that, then that's cool. We can hang out. But like, at least I know what it is. And I know that this isn't ultimately going to be for me because there's somebody else out there who wants children and wants to be the mother to my children and wants to do that and travel with me and be a unit with me and do this thing with me. I wanted that experience.

And she was completely down with it. But I put that on the table right out of the gate. You know, like if you're not cool with this, then that's okay. You know, like there was a level of, of, you know, emotional sobriety that I got to because of the sponsor that I had. That guy was instrumental in me learning how to be that guy. But when I got sick, he didn't know what to say. It was like, snap out of it.

You're ready to get out of it? Let's go. All right, buddy. It's great day out there. It's like, I'm going to blow my brains out. And I need you to stop telling me to shake it off. Like, I need to have a conference. And so then that also led to me feeling like even more alone.

Because now I'm in this paradigm shift where the guy who's been my guy for a long time, isn't the guy for me moving forward. And it wasn't until I found a sober old-timer who'd been through cancer four times. And we started talking and I just broke down. It was like, I don't know what to do and I don't feel like I should say I'm sober. I'm on all these drugs.

I'm in so much pain. You know, what am I doing? And he was like, don't let anybody tell you you don't belong or that you can't show up. You know, you've brought drunk people to AA meetings, right? I go, yeah. You know, what happened after that? They stayed sober.

They actually got sober. Anytime I brought a drunk or high person doing an A.m. They want to get, you know, getting this stuff. He's like, you tell me, you tell God. You don't need to tell anybody else. So that. There is a, there is a sort of ego component to being somebody in the rooms who has time and the identity that you craft around like being kind of someone who can like.

talk the talk and all of that. And, and, you know, in your case or in an analogous case where, you know, like, it's very binary. You're using or you're not. And like, this is how much time you have and blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't account for like a situation like that. It creates all this confusion about your standing and what it means to be sober and how that's going to be interpreted by your sober community that isn't conducive to being open. Like, you start to close down because you don't want to lose. like your status or how you're perceived within the community or or or have to reckon with the idea of not being sober or like resetting the clock and all of that like all of that is like

kind of coming into play a little bit I mean I don't want to project no no I went through a version of that that is going on and then also there was a point where it got bad enough that I had I had I just had a full on mountdown and is because also we're now by this time we're now entering into COVID So we're doing Zoom meetings. So there was a moment where I had like a full on breakdown, like a breakdown. I was losing my mind. And I don't know. Hurricane in your consciousness and a hurricane in your body.

Yeah. And I, you know, I had this meltdown and it's almost like I could feel those people in A.A. who, you know, came to my meeting because they thought I was going to produce their screenplay. recoiling and going oh not who I thought he was and I was totally fine with it it was like shaking the tree it was like everybody out I don't care to be the president of AA I mean even we're sitting here right now

and I'm breaking the tradition of anonymity at the level of press radio film I mean I'm I broke that in my book and I was a conscious that I had never said AA in an interview prior to to the book and now here. And I have to tell the truth. The story's too raw and too vulnerable for me to not speak about AA.

But the last thing I would ever want is to get, you know, pulled over drunk on the PCH and then AA gets blamed because I said I was a member of AA, which is what happens. And then the person who needs to get sober and go to a meeting doesn't go because they're like, see it doesn't work. A.A. does work.

It works. It works. Like, I was, I was at, I was at a point where I had no other choice. Like, I had no other choice. And, um, and I want to be very, very clear about that. And, and I thank that friend of mine, a friend of mine, uh, Ken, who referred talking me off a ledge and keeping me going to meetings. I mean, there were times when I was nodding out in meetings because of all the drugs I was on. and it just kept me anchored to the place that I could come back to when I was done with the drugs. And I'm, I've completely gotten off everything. So all the, all the pain killers, all the spinal nerve medication, all of that stuff. I just, I weaned off of all of it.

And, you know, and a full 100%, like, you know, whatever you consider sober. But I understand that that's, it's controversial. And I don't want somebody else out there. who thinks, well, you know, I'm going to go to AA and I'll just quit drinking and smoke some pot and be California sober, man. It's like, that's not what I did at all, at all. Sober, sober. Yeah, you're old school working staffs, man. Hardliner. But it's like, it's there when you need it and it needs to be there for the people that need it. And for me at the time, everything in my life is falling apart. So I'm looking for that place where I can be the leader and be okay. And

it's like in that moment, it was like, you know, you're going to save your ass or you're going to save your face. And I had a meltdown in the meeting, but also realized A is not the place for me to be melting down about my health. This is and having the same share every time about the pain I'm in and all this stuff. And I need to figure this out. And I need to figure this out. and I need to start surrendering to that and I need to find people that can help me re-center and that's when a guy in AA was talking about his therapist who was a very woo-woo red bookie youngian you know type of of of therapist and and then I started going to support groups for people that had raging autoimmune issues

and those were really interesting. Because as a member of AA, it's almost like I was coming out of, especially the meetings that I went to. I went to all men stags with guys that were like serious about sobriety. They didn't cheat on their wives. They were great fathers, great businessmen.

Like you'd think everybody drove a Mercedes in AA, you know? They were just like, had their stuff together and never moved from that seat in those meetings. Super reliable. You needed a ride to the airport 4 a.m., they're there. You need to help moving? No problem. Like anything, most generous great people I've ever met were those guys in A.

Now, the worst people I've ever met my life were some of the people at A who weren't working the program. But the point of it is, it's like, I came from and I was molded by those men and I could, and I understood the magic of, I understood the alchemy of the magic of Alcoholics Anonymous and how it could save your life and how it could change your life and how it could turn a San Francisco shooting gallery heroin addict into the nicest, sweetest old, man, you never meet in your life. I've seen it. And I took that into support groups for autoimmune. And what was happening there was infighting people trying to cancel the leaders of the meeting

for various reasons. Everyone was on drugs. So all the shares were just about all the drugs the people were taking. But I want to say it was incredibly helpful to me in a way that that even with all that going on, I started letting go and accepting maybe this is as good as it gets for you

and maybe this is what it's going to be. And I could see how the trauma was affecting other people and wasn't processing. Like I could kind of see the issue. the issues. You're seeing the patterns of like how trauma is related to. Yeah. There's a strain of that that's like running through all of these people who are struggling in a similar way to you. And so what I did was what I know how to do, which is kind of leave the big group meetings, pull a couple of the guys out who seemed like they were solution oriented and started meeting

with one of the guys we would meet in my backyard or his backyard. every week, sometimes twice a week. And we just have a one-on-one meeting because I know that there's a magic that can happen between two people when they start talking about their similar struggles. And then we added a few more guys, and then we started trying to, I started trying to like,

we need to meet, even if we don't feel like it. We got to stay strong. We got to get the reps in. We got to do this one, at least once a week. Yeah, you're laying an AA template over like a different situation. But like bringing these guys, you know, Like educating these. Kind of I'm taking what I learned in the SEAL teams to, you know, to like, you know,

to my calisthenics class or, you know, my yoga class, you know. And that was incredibly helpful for me as I was, I started trying to accept what was happening to me. And then that therapist was just laying into me about letting go. Yeah. like transcending this avatar of being this certain person. Why do you care about working out so much? Yeah. Why do you care about superheroes?

These superhero movies are horrible. Why do you care? You know, like that was her thing. And I needed to hear it. Why do you care so much? Why? Because I think it's going to fix me. I think it's going to be that thing

that's going to make me feel okay again or whole. You're smarter than that. What do you care with these people think? why aren't you writing? I want to know how you feel about all this, how you process it. You just rattled off five pages of Jungian philosophy. Like, why aren't you writing about this stuff?

Why aren't you thinking? You know, she was forcing me also back into God, or some sort of thoughts about maybe this is all just part of the process. And so that mythological part of my brain started clicking on. And I started calling her the lady of the lake. Because I'm like, every time I throw that fucking sword back into the water, your hand comes up and hands it back to me. And I don't want it.

I don't want the sword. You have, I don't care. I just want people leave me alone. And she's like, no, no, no, no. She's like, you're meant for something. Yeah. The Young Ann idea that this obstacle that's been put in your path is actually an opportunity. for growth and evolution if you can shift your perspective and perceive it as such.

So tough. And I had more things that I had to let go of. I just had to keep letting go. And that opened me up to all sorts of strange adventures. Yeah, like enter Santoria. Okay. I mean, come on, you've got to tell this story. So, you know, when I was recording my audiobook, during this week I was recording, my producer got on remotely and said, hey, I want to say something to you. I was out at a dinner party,

and I mentioned that I was recording your audio book. And someone at the dinner party said, oh, he's really big into Centauria. This is how stories get like, you know, metastasized. Like wide-eyed was like, he's really not. I know it, trust me, he's... With that said, like, God bless Centaria. And Centaria also holds...

I won't say I'm into it. Like, not a practicing... But Centaria holds a very interesting place for me specifically that I think a lot of people wouldn't connect the dots to that at the time I was experiencing these things and early into my illness, I wind up in Ecuador and I wind up in Cuba

with the Santeria Babbalao because I think I'm cursed. And I'm married to a Latin woman and that's the thing. Not in Roman Catholic Elementary School in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, but in countries where the transatlantic slave trade

was very, very active, you have Western Africans who brought their gods with them on these boats to the new world, but then were forced baptized by the Spanish masters and

forced to believe in Catholic saints. And the Africans found a workaround which was Santeria, worship of the saints. Ha ha ha. which was basically for every Catholic icon, there is an avatar. It's an avatar for one of their African gods. So when you pray to Santa Barbara, you're praying to Chang'o,

the axe-wielding, leopard-wearing, you know, warrior god, you know. And so I wind up there. And I am, it's a lot of animal saccharging. I'm saying this out of context right now. So I feel like I need to say that all of the animals were consumed. They were all eaten. So PETA, I know you got mad at me for killing a snake with a tomahawk in my driveway before a children's barbecue in my backyard.

I know that that was a call that came into my managers at one point that they were disappointed that I killed a snake with an axe when I had children coming over in my yard. Okay, fine. I'll give you that. But this was a whole different situation. But yeah, there were ancient African rituals that were performed on me in case I was cursed. This Babelau became mounted by an African spirit on multiple occasions around me. And things came out of his mouth that he could never have known. So there is there's something to it. There was something to all of this. I had a flu, a horrible flu when I flew to Ecuador first to meet him. And after the first ritual, I woke up and it was gone. I had a, you know, vivid, vivid hallucinatory dream in which I was

walking around in my former life and there were all these things that were waiting for me in my yard packages that were unopened that were addressed to me that I couldn't get they were being mailed to the wrong place and then I found a box of cigars on my table which I was informed which is how the gods are trying to communicate with you and they're trying to get you what's waiting for you and I had an office full of like movie memorabilia for all these projects I hadn't been in but it was all being suspended by the fact that through this illness, this curse. And after two days in Ecuador, I wound up in Cuba for a week, about six months later. And I was there for like a week-long ritual, a protection ritual, and where I became the physical

embodiment of my god, Chungo. We can go into more detail about, I certainly do in the book. That's one of the wilder chung- There's a lot, like in your defense, there's a lot of context here. And like, I see this as, you know, like a desperation and a curiosity born out of frustration with the Western medical system that was just incapacitated when it comes to, like, diagnosing and dealing with this illness. So you're forced to look elsewhere. And in that state of desperation, like, I'll do anything. Like, Santa Maria, okay, like, well, I'll do.

What else? therapy, okay, like, what are we doing? Let's, what are we doing? Let's go. Which then enter Joseph Campbell, because now what happened is, and this is kind of jumping which is kind of superheroy also. When the young end therapist is like, why do you care about superheroes? Like, that's the whole bag with, with, you know, like, it's all about like the hero's journey

and the, you know, how are you, how are you the protagonist in this? But I think what she was saying was you can have more agency over your art. artistry as a writer, as a storyteller, where you're not so reliant on these people calling you to go do it. Whether they decide or not that you get to be this person. You can, you know, you can do it. And so, you know, jumping ahead a little bit, just momentarily, but, but, you know, at the time I don't realize it, but I'm being initiated into a religion of my ancestors on my father's side, which I don't know at the time. And that to me is really mind-blowing to think about that it wasn't random.

It wasn't, I wasn't in some other culture I'm not connected to. You know, I find out that I have a long lineage of African slaves taken from Western Africa. Like I have, like it's on, it's there. It's not only there genetically, it's their paper trail. Like I know who these people are. My ancestors on that side. And these were their gods that they were forced into not believing in. at least subverting their belief in.

And this starts kind of without, you know, without me knowing it at the time, it's starting to kickstart. The real spiritual journey starts getting into full gear because now I'm being put in front of, I'm being introduced to forms of spirituality that my ancestors who went through very, very difficult times put their beliefs in the things that they were praying to. So my mother said, why don't you pray to God, the one that gave it to me? Well, I'm starting to meet the gods that my ancestors were praying to when they went through some of the most difficult trying moments in human history.

And I find out that that's in my family tree. Everything that we've talked about up to now is prelude to this, which is really the heart of the book and the story that you want to tell, which is your connection, your relationship with your ancestry. the impact of that on your present circumstances and, and, you know, the impact that that is weathered by all of us by our predecessors. I mean, you were somebody who was always interested in your lineage to one degree or another. Didn't you, like, always want to get on that Henry Louis Gates show where they like, you know, like, this was, this was sort of percolating in the back of your mind all the time.

Like, where do I come from? Because of being Armenian. Yeah. On the Armenian side, like, which is Armenian and German, I knew that I was descended from a German soldier or officer in World War I who was stationed in Ottoman Turkey. My great-grandmother is an Armenian genocide survivor who lost nine of her children. Eight of them were killed in front of her. It's the most horrific thing. It's horrible. Yeah. Like what she survived.

It's horrible. Managed. Yeah. And so she suffered and then wound up at some point in a relocation camp for survivors of the genocide. side pregnant by a German officer whose house she was working in. And he went back to Germany and we never knew who he was. And my grandmother, that half German half Armenian, grew up not knowing the identity of her father and she was never allowed to know who that was.

I was always interested. I mean, if you go poking around your German, unknown German family tree, you better get ready for something. But that guy's son was a, an SS officer, I think, right? Yeah. So my, as it turns out, my great-grandfather, who served under the Kaiser in World War I in the Ottoman Empire, he has a son who grows up to become an SS officer carrying out the Jewish Holocaust, not knowing that he has a half-sister who was born in a relocation camp in the wake of the Armenian genocide, that first big genocide of the 20th century.

So I talk about it in the book, the idea of the swastika, which is a symbol, like a symbol for good luck, prosperity, was then flipped to the other direction and co-opted by the Nazi, German, and Austrian, and then stood for hate. But the idea that you have this SS officer whose half sister is, if you see old Armenian rugs, they have the swastika flip the other way. So it's so wild to think that there is this, this kind of looking glass between the two of them. They don't know each one exists and they both stand for the swastika pointed each direction. Right. Mirror images. And that's all in one side of my bloodline. This is on the maternal side of your family. which now you're getting into life on earth as a human being and being born in a certain place at a certain time,

certain parents, a certain means, during certain world events. And it's like, you come out of the shoot, go, here you go. So there's that side. We open the conversation talking about epigenetics and the inheritance of just unimaginable trauma from your forebears. Yeah. And then there's your paternal side.

How did you come into this awareness that you weren't actually a manganello? So in trying to, trying to get accepted onto finding your roots, once they had the access to these various genetic pools and databases, they accept. It was about like 10 years of trying and they finally got me on. And what do you think was underneath that desire to get on that show?

I don't know. I think it was from my mother and her sister. I think they'd always wondered who the German was. They knew there was a photo of the German and it was in my Armenian great-grandmother's carpet bag after the war and my grandmother went into her carpet bag at one point and found the photo and my great-grandmother snatched it back. and wouldn't tell her who. And then my aunt had the photo and then somehow got lost.

And it was like, oh, man, if there's one photo, it's like, there's one watch. It's like the Pulpiction watch. It's like the one picture, you know, but it got lost. I don't know. I guess there's also, there's a curiosity that was sparked by, by knowing that I was Armenian and not understanding what that fully meant until I was an adult. Because when you're a kid, nobody's going to tell you what it means to be Armenian. This is not taught in schools.

No, it's not. The United States didn't call it officially a genocide until 2019. And even then there were there were attempts to try to walk that back. And it's not taught in school and you know, MGM was going to make a movie called The 40 Days of Musadag based on this German Jewish reporter's account of his wandering through the land that belonged to to the Armenians after the genocide and the atrocity. And MGM was gonna make a movie of it and the Turkish government threatened to boycott American products

if MGM put that film out. And so they were squashed and there wasn't another one again until I think like, like Ararat or something, which was like 90s, like it just, you know, and even then it's been completely underrepresented. I have a lot of, you know, Jewish friends who had no idea that there was a Holocaust before, you know, a genocide before the Jewish Holocaust.

And so it's not taught. And, you know, and certainly when you're a little kid and the adults get together and start talking, you're picking up on little things, but it's not until you're older that you start asking those questions. And, you know, I know I have a long, crazy, you know, Italian last name. But my mother, I think, is more culturally Armenian than anything. She's half Croatian, but she's Armenian because her mother was the one making the food for her. And her grandmother was the one coming over to take care of her and visit.

And so there was a lot of Armenian culture. And culturally, I grew up with a mother who was Armenian. And so once you start asking all of those questions, then you start doing the research. Then you find Peter Balakian's books, the Burning Tigris, which is like a textbook. and then you find the Black Dog of Fate, which is a memoir about his memories of his grandmother that survived the genocide. And that was a big influence on me. That's probably my favorite memoir, is Black Dog of Fate. And it always stuck with me after I read it.

And he was instrumental in me writing that chapter about the genocide that appears in the book. And he would, you know, prove free to give me notes and things like that and making sure that I was historically accurate. because at the time there were only those two books. Now since, like Eruk Bogosian, who's another hero of mine, wrote, took seven years to write Operation Nemesis, which was about the attempts by the Armenians after the war to kill all of the Turkish government officials who were responsible for the genocide who were freed because of the oil contracts and military interests in Turkey. They were all freed. And so this wealthy Armenian, it was like the Armenian Munich. And so he wrote this book, Operation Nemesis, which is about that. So once you start reading those and getting into those, you start asking questions,

then you go, who's this German guy? And I kept trying to get on the show to see if I could figure it out. And in getting those answers, the show said, the show called to say, we can't go any forward with the filming of the episode until we talk to you. and when we got on the phone, they said, your father, his father wasn't his father. So your paternal grandfather, Emilio John Mangonello, it's not your father's father, it's somebody else.

It's like, wait. So, okay, wait, did you find the German? Okay, forget about that. You know, if you do the show, we'll tell you. You thought you understood the paternal side of your ancestry, and this gets upended. Yeah, my dad is full-blooded Italian, man, FBI, you know, and we'd watch Goodfellas. And he'd say, oh, Henry Hill, he can't get made because he's half-Irish.

You kids can't get made because of your mom. I'm full-blooded Italian. You know, that was a source of pride. And also, you know, these are very, you know, territorial days in Boston. So you have neighborhoods in anywhere, you know, in big city, you have neighborhoods sectioned off by ethnicity. everybody fights because they used to fight in the old world and you better not bring home some guy from another neighborhood to meet your dad because we've been fighting for centuries and how dare you and it's just different you know like all that colloquialism and kind of like nationalism

sort of like you know once you start getting into the mixing part you have to start rethinking all of that especially when like you're not an ocean away you're two blocks away you know but that's how Boston was at the time so you were what your ethnicity was your last name that's who you were My dad is full-blooded Italian, so to find out that half of him wasn't what we thought. And in fact, half of them were basically like the other two neighborhoods you grew up fighting against. And made sense to me. How'd he take it? Not great.

But I think it's 72 years old to, I mean, identity is such a, such a strange thing, I mean, to a certain degree. I mean, in a fragile thing, I think. But yeah, I know, I can't speak for him and I don't wanna speak for him, but I can't imagine going through 72 years of life and then having someone say, you know, I just, I hope that it made sense the way that it did for me, because it felt for me,

me like my eyes were out of focus when I looked in the mirror my whole life. I didn't know what I was looking at. Like, what am I? Like, you can't put me on the sopranos because I don't look like those. I don't fully look like those guys. You can tell I'm mixed with something. I'm like part Viking. I don't have any body hair.

So that's, I don't know where that came from. You know, people in Europe think I'm German when I'm there. And they don't know me who I am. that they you know and uh so it's like oh yeah this makes total sense like oh my gosh like okay i know why now it's focused for me um but also um you know i think that um i think that when you if you're sick and you start asking why and then you start looking at you know what went on with your parents you start looking at what went on with your parents parents and you really start walking this stuff back, you can see what slides downhill.

For me, the meaning and the impact of all of this lands with this idea that you have this latent impulse to investigate your ancestry. Yeah. That was, you know, kind of incepted into you by, you know, whatever was going on. It doesn't even matter. Like, this is like this thing inside of you and you're driven, you know, towards a greater understanding of where you came from without consciously understanding at the time that this is actually the skeleton key that is going to unlock everything that you're searching for in terms of

healing yourself, understanding who you are, like confronting all of these conflicting identities and the confusion that that's causing you. Like all of it is on the other side of this kind of journey of discovery into the past. Yeah. And and even then after all that work finding out the identity of the German and then I have this realization when I'm in Armenia that it just doesn't matter it doesn't matter who the father was has no bearing on anything these are stories yeah it will attach meaning to the meaning of that this story was in the understanding of my illness and where it came from and the roots of it. My great-grandmother survived what she had to survive so that she could wind up

pregnant by this German and give birth to this baby alone that she believed God sent to her. I mean, it's the story of the immaculate conception in a way. A woman with a child without a father, who's the father. She believed God was the father. God sent her the baby to help her survive. And that baby, my grandmother, you know, dies at age 40, young and was sick for half her life. It doesn't get to see my mother grow up. Like lupus? Yeah, lupus. And her hands were closing up the way that mine were. She's covered in a skin rash, skin rashes, the point where she had to wear gloves in public, hats the way that I was. And all of that

happened to her heading into age 40 just like it did for me. And then in my darkest hour, I adopt this little dog that's been sleeping on my lap the whole time who is like an angel sent to me to make sure that I don't do something drastic or that I have a reason or I can shift from the role of patient, sick, sick patient to care.

caregiver, which is what you learn in AA, to get out of yourself, to go take care of somebody else, be of service, and you'll get out of your own head, you'll get out of your own illness. And the dog came to me the way that my grandmother was sent to, my great-grandmother. But then you have my mother, who's the third one in the line. And my mother suffers from these panic disorders when the time she was young. And I think it was her way of holding off that, you know, the shadow, whatever, whatever that, the disease, the thing coming for her, it was like, if I don't feel it fully, then it can't get me. But then that, there's aspects of that,

that play out in the rest of your life as well. Yeah, that translates into not being able to make herself available to meet your emotional needs when you're young. Yeah. Like, not a lot of hugging, not a lot of nurturing out of self-preservation. Yeah. And, and, you know, and then he gets to me. And, and, and I've, you know, I gave this speech at the, I'm a board member at the Children of Armenia Fund. And I got involved.

They asked me to, they, they offered to give me a humanitarian award at their 20th anniversary gala because of speaking up about the genocide on finding your roots. That became this like really important TV episode for. for Armenians. And I kept getting stopped everywhere, like in airports. People were crying. And I mean, it was like led to all these conversations. And, uh, but I'd also hear from people, um, so you're only an eighth Armenian, you know, like I'm not, I'm not or, um, I think it's so great how, how you're like born again Armenian. You're like discovering all of this and you're getting so involved. And it's like I, I, my mother's more culturally Armenian than anything. So I grew up with,

like, I, excuse me, you know, like, hi. you know, but what hit me was, the point is, is that I am Armenian. And what happened happened for me to be here. And I carry a link to that ancient bloodline because of what they all went through. And in the final chapter of the book, it's called the Monarch. because, you know, my current A.A. sponsor, he was proofreading chapters for me as I was writing. And he gets it. He gets the whole thing. And he said something incredibly wise that stuck to me. He said, you know, monarch butterflies take four generations to migrate. And the first three fly as far as they can.

And then it's the fourth one that gets there. And I feel like, you know, this book is me getting there and hopefully breaking that pattern. I know where it came from. I know what I carry with me. I know that it wasn't random. And I've grown to a place where I don't complain about it. Why not me if I could do it? Now, if I die and I find out that I chose all of this for myself, I'm going to be pissed off.

And I'm never doing this again. But haven't been through what I went through, what I went through, I'm glad I did. And I'm okay with it. And I hope that, I hope that one day I have tangible proof that I have broken the chain because you know, I have healthy children that don't have to think about this or don't have to deal with any of this anymore. And I hope that the book provides the shove-off for thousands and thousands of boats with people with nothing better to do than try to figure out where their own mystery illnesses started and came from.

and try to find those answers the way that I did. You talk about warrior mode. To me, there is no greater, like, battle to engage with as a warrior than to confront generations of trauma that you've inherited and to overcome them, to heal them, to make peace with them. and to arrest that cycle and spare your children and the next generation from suffering what you had to. Like, that's the greatest gift that you could give your children. And I think this relationship, like this understanding that you did inherit, like some of this,

and we all do, like, like in our epigenetics, like in a way that we can't quite make sense of, in our mitochondria or whatever science can or can't tell us about the veracity of that, there is this somatic experience of truth that, yes, they live inside of us and for better or worse. And in your case, like the trauma of your ancestors is so severe, so severe. Yeah. And to the extent that maybe you just are inhabiting like a fraction, of that. It's still enough. Like, what is the relationship of that to your alcoholism, to this autoimmune disease? And how do you, and to like grapple with that? Like, that is, you know, that is a heroic act. Like, this is the crux of the hero's journey. And to come out the other

side. I mean, you still haven't really elaborated on the relationship with you confronting this and reckoning with it and how that transatlantic. translated into like healing. Like you, you have overcome this illness that you described in such horrific fashion. So help me understand that part of it. Because there's all these mystical things and synchronicities with prayer cards. And like,

it's like God is talking to you throughout this whole thing. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's, it's wild, man. Yes, it is. And, and,

um, so, you know there was a day I woke up and I felt better and I had no idea why it was like first of all did you ever get a proper diagnosis I mean it was all dumping ground stuff it was all like you know I mean you know I was grappling with what am I calling this colitis am I calling it Crohn's like what are those because I've met 100 people and all of them have different symptoms or different levels of severity and it's it's just it's a dumpster that they're throwing things into that they don't know how to explain they don't know where they come from they

don't know how to treat them um showgruns syndrome or you know sweet sweet syndrome um you know and and then they're going to send you off to a host a handful of doctors that all aren't going to communicate with each other other than you're in the the results are in the central database and every time you go in they're going to ask you are you still allergic to this are you still taking this no no i've done this every time i go into the day i'm new office um they're compartmentalizing all of your issues and nobody was looking at it holistically there's there's something in the control room inside of my body that's flipping switches what is it and where's the off switch and how do we tell it to stop. And so to me, it just didn't matter. Like I didn't, I didn't think of it in any of those

terms or ways. It's how do I tell my body to stop attacking itself? How do I stop this? How do I stop this civil war? And, you know, there was, there was a day that, that I woke up and I felt better. And I, I had this funny feeling. Like, I just felt different. Every time, for seven years, I knew it was in there. I knew there was fighting going on. I knew that if I exerted myself at all, I was going to get sick because it was taking soldiers

from the autoimmune battlefield away to like build muscle in the gym, you know, or whatever. And if they took troops away, then I would get sick. I would collapse. And so I knew not to push just, you know, and I woke up one day and felt like,

I felt hungry. I've been hungry in a long time because I know if I eat it's going to cause pain and it's going to cause blood so it's like why would you want to eat because you have to

it's like okay you know and the dog would make me eat she'd come over and make sure I was eating because she wanted to like snacks off the table but still you know she would make sure I was eating you have to eat you have to eat now you have to eat no I didn't want to

I woke up one day I wanted to eat what hell it started with that and then from there days started stringing together, weeks started stringing together. I felt like, okay, you're going to start working out again. You're going to work out now. You're going to have to eat more. So far so good. Okay, now let's work out. Increase the intensity. See what happens. So far so good. Months like

that started happening. I knew like something's going on. I'm better. Like I don't, I don't know how to explain it. It's gone. Like it's gone. I'm telling you it's gone. And I was working out at home and I had YouTube on. And, you know, one video ended and another one started up, and it was you talking to Gabor Mante. And I stopped because it was like everything I'm hearing is like, for me. And they're talking about, you know, autoimmune disorder, you know, and talking about spontaneous remission.

Some spontaneous remission is what I heard. And he starts describing what happened to me. Like I couldn't explain why I felt bad. better and then I did that, that, that, that. So I fumbled around in the dark and found the light switch. And I got on my phone and I looked up his Instagram page and followed and then DM'd. His daughter answered and said, I know who you are and my dad will talk to you this afternoon. So I got on a call and talked to Gabora that day and we talked about repression, growing up and repressing those feelings of,

of being emotionally intelligent or being, you know, shamed for being sensitive, which, you know, alcoholics, you are too sensitive. You probably should be less sensitive, but sensitivity is also the superpower. It's why there's so many great artists who are alcoholics because they see things and feel things and do microcalculations in ways that most people can't

that are annoying to other people. People are annoyed when I know, I know the second their mood shifts. What happened right there? What'd you do? Get out of my head. Stop. Leave me alone.

You know, like, I'm the worst in relationships. Because I know when someone's mood shifts, you know, my fiance is like, will you stop it, please? She has to get used to me. I know something's going on like three steps before she even knows something's happening. That empathy that you described at the beginning. But you can push that down because it's like, you know, you got to be masculine or, you know, whatever that's seen as, where if, you know, emotional intelligence is yin,

aggression is masculine and they're just polar opposites and nothing's wrong or right or toxic or not. I'm not, you know, but the idea that when fame happened to me, I was like, oh, great, I don't ever have to be accused of being all these things that have been rattling around in my head ever again. I can just be that and I'm going to build this avatar and I'm going to be that guy. But then people are going to assume that I'm stupid because I've created this avatar and they're going to talk to me in a way that isn't commensurate with the respect that I feel like I should deserve. And I see that they're doing it and I hate it. And I can see it in real time.

And now I hate the whole thing. And I think less of them for believing in the avatar because it was all fake anyway. Right. You know that. And you architected the whole thing. I know. And then I hate it. So it's like now I have no one to blame but me.

Uh-huh. And the illness tore the whole thing down, took my body away, took the whole thing down, all of it. the body, the career, the relationship, the public image, all of it, all of it was gone. You're nothing. You're nothing but a spirit housed in this shell. And that's it. What are you going to be if you're alive next week, which us sitting around this conference table up in the sky?

We're not sure if you're going to be around next week. So what do you got, pal? You're going to surrender? You're going to let go and let us run the show or you want to keep? keep running it. What do you want to do? And so talking to Gabor, it's like, oh, yeah, I architected the whole thing. I repressed all of these parts of myself, compartmentalized, pushed things down, never spoke about how it felt. And I was angry. I was angry at God. I was angry at the universe, was angry about why this was happening to me.

I was not in acceptance. I wanted my old life back. I wanted the next job. I wanted that thing that was going to get me out of it. But what he said was that it all got kicked off. The healing got kicked off because of, at one point, the pain was so bad. And I was in a hotel room trying to finish this movie.

I was shooting in New Jersey called the Kill Room. And I had been in chronic pain for months. And I was sweating and hemorrhaging blood again. And I thought I was going to have to leave this movie and go to the emergency room. And I had the dog in the hotel with me. And, you know, my marriage was for the most part over at that point. You know, she wasn't available to even come and get the dog out of the hotel room so that I could, in case I need to go to the hospital. I was alone.

Like, alone with this dog. in the room with the blood. I mean, it was like, what am I doing? And I called my doctors and they said, we needed to come back to L.A. And what we're going to do is we're going to cut you open. We're going to divert you back to the ostomy bag to give your system a break.

So you stop bleeding. And like a career criminal who's hearing that we're going to come and take you back to prison, no you're not. They're like, what? I'm like, not doing it. you have to no i don't i don't have to do anything and i don't want to live that way i'm not going to do it

again they beg me i said no and i hung up and gore said that that was the moment that i took back my own agency that all the only agency i had left was over whether i could live or die like i was given this gift of life which mind you i didn't do anything drastic you know there's a moment where I had to give my gun away. Right before I got the dog, I gave a gun away because I kept thinking about it and just stuck it out.

And I chose that, that, regardless of what was going to happen to me, I wasn't going to go back. And if I was going to be dead, come and take me because I'm done with all this. Like I just had had it. And that was really the final surrender where I let go of it all.

And I somehow finished that movie, went back home to LA, crawled into a spare bedroom for three months, just heavily medicated. I went up being put on fentanyl patches. I was on opioids with acetaminophen to accelerate it. I was on a nerve medication for my neck that I took at night. I was getting THC tinctures, like nothing was breaking through.

And it got to the point where, I then had to take in like large doses of marijuana during the day because I thought I was, I just thought, I'm going to die. I can't get comfortable. It's 24 hours a day. I'm awake all night trying to take these pain. I'm like out of my mind. I mean, I was going crazy fentanyl pack.

I mean, I'm like, the whole thing was just, it's like, what am I doing? Like this is the biggest waste. I can't do another movie because of look at what just happened. Like, so that's done. You're done as an actor. You're done. leaving the house. Like you're done finding five seconds where you're not in pain. And I told the doctors, no, I'm ready to die. Like, hurry up. And after three months of being medicated,

trying to get out of pain, I think there was something in the marijuana that broke through. and I think it bumped the record that was skipping, that pain record. It bumped it to the next song, the marijuana. And that's, I started feeling better incrementally. And then I woke up that day and felt like I want to eat. And then I knew I was done with the marijuana. So I had to get off of the marijuana, which I did. Then I had to start stretching out the, the,

fentanyl, or the pain pills, started stretching those out. Got off of those. Stretched out the fentanyl patches. Got off of those. Then stretched out the nerve medication. Got off of that. Like just detox piece by piece by piece to get back to my baseline. And then, of course, my insurance company called and said, oh, now that you're feeling

better, you're going to have to choose between the two drugs that you're taking that may have been responsible for you feeling better. Now, I knew that there wasn't the drugs that made me feel better. But I definitely let them know what I thought about what they were saying. You know, oh, so finally after seven years of brutal agonizing and excruciating pain, and I feel better now. Finally. And now you're going to make me do a Sophie's choice of which drug I think may have been

responsible and you're going to make me get off of one. I go, shame on you. I go, if I die, I will make sure that I leave it in my will, that there will be someone whose life goal and I will leave them everything that I own to try to take you down in court for killing me. I said, so I hope this is recorded. It's a conversation recorded. I heard that at the beginning of the conversation. I said, there's blood on your hands. So watch me. I'm going to quit one of these drugs. Take me off of the pills. Fine. I'll only do the other one. But I knew that was the reason why. But I wanted to put these people through.

Because they're just, you know, they're not, how can you care? And I told all of this to Gabor and he said, it sounds like you're living an authentic life. Finally. And as long as you continue to live authentically, I think you're going to be okay. And then I met the shaman from Australia, Peter, which is a whole other adventure. And our breath work and all kinds of other, you know. Because of wild stuff. Yeah, healing modality. But your show was that light bulb that came on for me that made me perk up and realize why. Like, you know, because people asked me, my mother asked me like, what happened?

Like, how did you get better? And at the time, I didn't know. But after talking to Gabor, I know now. Like, I know he's right. And so it's fitting that, you know, to kick off the book press tour that I'm here with you because, you know, I'm, I mentioned that conversation in the book.

It's amazing to hear that. And moving for me. I mean, it's helpful as a reminder as to like why I do this, you know. You never know where the boomerang flies out to. It's kind of a, you know, a weirdly abstract job, you know, I'm putting this transmission out there, but I'm sort of detached from how it's being received or how it's impacting people. So it's like emotional for me to hear that.

And it's reminding me of the first time that I met Gabour because that episode was actually the second one. The first one, I sought him out in, it must have been, I'd have to look, but I think it was probably 2014, maybe 2015. And he had come on my radar and I was like, I have to meet this guy. And I flew to Vancouver. Like I was still, you know, kind of a traveling salesman with Michael. microphones, you know, begging, borrowing and stealing, trying to convince people to come on the show. And the only way I was going to, you know, get him to do it was to, like, go to him. And I went to him and he did what I wanted him to do, which is to flip the equation around and

basically, like, deconstruct me. And it was a version of, like, listen, you know, you, I'm sure your, you know, parents are loving people and they did their best. But, like, the truth of the matter is, is like you have all of these needs that want unmet. You can't say that that is unrelated to the struggles that you've gone through in your life. And you need to like look at this and heal this and make peace with this. Otherwise, it's going to continue to show up and drive a barren behavior in your life. And that has proven to be true. Like I was still, I wasn't ready to really, like it was the first time that I was being confronted with these ideas.

And I don't think I was quite ready to really fully take that on. But every day since then, I've thought about that. And I've been on this journey to like really reckon with my past and heal this stuff because it shows up in my marriage and parent. And like, you know how it just metastasizes in it. There's a there's like a yucky layer that covers everything until you really kind of like look at this stuff. deal with it. Yeah, and that's, you know, going back to like sobriety. And it's nothing, let me just say, sorry to interrupt you, but it's nothing like what you have had. You know,

it's like a very minor version of like what you, your pain is your pain. Well, but I, what I hear you saying is that there's a series of knots in a rope and I can't get these things on tide. Exactly. I don't understand it. And it's not one knot. You know, when I started writing the book or started meeting with publishers, sometimes people would say things to me like, you know, what are your four steps to getting over your autoimmune issues for other people out there? And I'm like, are you testing me to see if I'm going to put the number four on a book cover in terms of, and like, you know, hey, you know. And my answer was, I don't know.

Like, I don't know what they are because I was at the beginning of writing the book. the book process for me was sorting through all of it and understanding what what had to do with what and then also like what's interesting and not interesting because people would say also to me like you know it was writing the book therapeutic and it's like no no you're sitting there and writing about yeah it's in dead children in Armenia like it's an exorcism no I don't want to do that you know or like it didn't I had sorted through all the parental stuff when I went in a sobriety. Like I, you know, I did all of that.

And this was connecting dots. This was also using a lifetime as a storyteller to adapt my own life, which is a strange process. And, but also coming to the realization that it did fall into the Cambelian circle. Weirdly. Everything was like, oh, oh, oh, up down, up down. I meet Chubaka and then I go and find Merlin and here's the lady of the lake. And I mean, it was like, oh, I find out my last name isn't my last name.

Oh, my God, I'm King Arthur. Oh, wait, I found the, I found the grail the second time. Wait, I'm Parzival. Oh, my God. You know, it was like, he just, it just goes, it's like there's historical precedent for everything that I went through from the conversation I have about Western dragons versus Eastern dragons as it relates to my disease, the understanding that, that I'm being introduced to the African Yorba gods of my answer.

and becoming the physical embodiment of one of them. I mean, it was like, oh my God, like I wish Joseph Campbell was around because I just, I want to take him out of the lunch and give him a hug, you know, but it's, you know, what part of what was responsible? Well, I don't know. What part of what was responsible for me being sick? I think a lot of it. And I think that I had to confront each piece.

I think Centa Rio was responsible for a piece of it. I think the side quests I was sent on by the Greek Orthodox mother superior was a piece of it. I think Jung is a piece. I think Campbell's a piece. I think reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead to my friend in a coma and having him pass away and that whole experience was a piece. I think Hindu ideas about choosing your parents or, you know, what goes on before, you know, I think the band tool is a huge part of it.

I think the song Parabola that I quote in the book, it's like, wait, how do they understand? Wait a minute. You know, and the numbers of the universe and symbols that get repeated and symbology and numerology and all the things that they're in I mean I think that's a piece I think there's so many there's so much information that there was such a complex series of knots over time that it was like I needed seven years to go back and untie every single one of them and on that one August morning after seven years of pain and suffering I knew I had somehow I untied the last knot well I shouldn't say that. I still had a knot left that Peter helped me untie. There was a real, I don't know,

there's a conversation to be had about spirits. And I know we talked about the physical scientific proof for generational trauma, but for my feeble human brain to think of it as there are ghosts in your family tree, in your ancestry that are screaming. And they want to, they want to be heard. they want to be understood and until I went through some modicum of the suffering that they went through in some cases maybe even worse in one case or two you know but um until I understood that how am I supposed to tell the story or how am I supposed to fully understand this and then and then now I'm in a position where it's like well okay why this happened to me well I think that's where I'm at now. I'm starting to find, I'm going to find out. You did that podcast. You went and flew to

Gabors to talk to him and then years later, here I am. And you help me figure out my issues without even knowing that that was your path. And now I'm here and I don't know what happens after. I don't know who speaks to me after or who I'm passing the baton to or, you know, I met so many people dealing with so many people are coming to me now and being like, you know, can I see Peter? Can I call it? I'm like, just, Peter's a reckless. You're not going to talk to Peter, but it's okay. Like, you can talk to me.

And it's just about the human experience. It's like, what the hell is going on here? Yeah, I think to your point about the publisher saying, you know, like what are the four ways you're going to cure your auto, you know, like wanting this like really reductive solution-based, like how to advise, you know, spin on this whole thing. What you're doing rightly is what we learn in the rooms of recovery, which is that we're not here to give advice. We're here to share our experience, strength, and hope. And like, this is my story.

And take from it, what you need to take from it and interpret it as you will through the filter or lens of your unique set of life experiences and draw your conclusions as you will. And it's for it's for the reader to decide what it's, means. Yeah. Because you're just like, this is the story. And if, if I have to be rigorously honest about this, like I am so brutally honest in that book and raw, because I don't know what part of that is going to be the key for somebody else. So, you know, there were also lots of notes and red lines through a lot of the body horror as I was writing, you know, from my editor. Like, do you need to keep talking about something popping in the mirror or, you know, whatever it all was. But it's your willingness to go there. And it's a demonstration of the degree to which you're

willing to be honest and open and vulnerable. And that's, we were talking about this earlier, like, that's what's going to really engender trust in the reader and create that, like, connection to your story. And the more specific you are about the uniqueness of your story, the more ironically relatable it is for somebody else. It's that same thing. You go into a room, one of these rooms, and you see somebody get up to the podium, and you're like, I have nothing in common with this person,

and they share their story. The facts of their experience couldn't be more different than your own, and you can't believe how much you're relating to the emotional experience of what they endured. Yeah, and I think selfishly or whatever, You know, I lived a closeted experience for 10 years. You know, I, I, I was closeted by the illness in a lot of ways.

I, I, there weren't a lot of people who knew what was going on with me. Definitely not the extent of what was going on with me. People that were close to me. And I, I was scared to talk about it. And I was, I didn't want to be labeled as a sick guy. You know, also before I got, you know, four years of health behind me and lots of, you know, healthy, great productions back under my belt, you know, I was afraid that I shouldn't act anymore in good conscience or good faith because I was doing something. I was trying to get away with something that maybe I shouldn't be getting away with. And, you know, it was all fine while I was fighting. through something. I mean, certainly people act when they're sick, people act when they're injured. I mean, okay. But I think when the writing was on the wall, I realized, yeah, you probably,

you probably never going to do this again. So that all led to me. And I think also like some of the things that people were saying online and things people were saying in my face a lot led me to to not really want to be a, you know, every conversation I had with Small Talk for like 10 years and it sucked. And so I think part of the book also and the brutal honesty of the book too is like, I want people know who I am. You know, I think I'm lucky enough that as an artist, as a writer, as an actor, I get paid to explore myself and therefore explore the human condition. And the silver lining of all of this was I was given the most fucking insane story I've ever heard and it's mine. And so I didn't want to leave anything on the floor when it came to this book.

Is it cathartic for you to share all of this today, to get it down on paper one thing and then to just kind of verbalize it? Yeah, I feel like, yeah, I had like maybe the first real public conversation. conversation than I've ever had. I certainly, you know, after the workout, you, you saw one of my scars and the camera's rolling and I showed you mine, you showed me yours. And that's certainly something that I never imagined happening. So it's just who I am.

for better or worse and I wanted to I think I wanted to avoid the human experience for a long time. I wanted to somehow like transcend the human experience and find some kind of golden ticket that meant that I wouldn't feel the way that I felt my whole life before I found alcohol and the way that I felt after I had to quit and then the way that I felt when I was sick and and I think at its core, I'm supposed to have a human experience. I'm just supposed to be a human being. And as an artist, that's your job. Your job isn't to, the job's not to be a superhero.

The job's to be a human being. And, you know, I'm okay with that. It's an unreal story. It's beautifully told in the book. It's incredibly powerful. And I appreciate the trust that you've shown me and helping you tell it. You know, I think it's going to help a lot of people. You're entering a new phase of your life where you have the opportunity to be of service to so many people.

To take everything you've learned in recovery and apply that to people that don't struggle with substance abuse issues. but are reckoning with some version of what you've endured. And so as we kind of wrap this up and close, what is the message that you want to put out there to the person who's listening to this or watching and is in the midst of some version of your struggle, confused, grappling with despair and hopelessness, getting gaslit by the medical system, the whole thing?

Well, sometimes the best thing you can do is just do nothing. Meaning don't do something drastic. I just never gave up and every time I got knocked down I kept standing back up. I look at the sacrifice of my great-grandmother, survived the genocide, watched eight of her children murder in front of her, was shot and left for dead while the ninth baby was supposed supposed to starve in the crib and then drowned in her escape across the Euphrates River. She won. And, you know, and then winds up pregnant in a camp for survivors.

And then comes to America and is married off to an abusive man. And then watch that 10th baby my grandmother die in her arms. It's like, you know, why would you want to go on with this whole experiment? it. And what I'll kind of realize is that if everything happens all at once, and you do believe that, the time is this perception, then I'm simultaneously playing my part while she's playing hers. And this is just, you know, the cross of our family. And my job was to make sure that her story didn't go on her and that it wasn't for nothing and to fully understand what it meant for her sacrifice in order for me to be here and there were moments believe me where it was dark there was no

light whatsoever and i didn't see a reason to go on but because of what she went through i realized i can't check out i'm not allowed if she didn't check out who the hell am i think i can't and you know i I sit here on the other side of all of this. And I certainly didn't feel this way while I was going through it. But now that I'm on the other side, when I do it again, no. Was it worth it? Yes. Yes.

And yeah, you're right. You know, I can, I prayed that if I got through this, then I would somehow be transformed into something more useful, something stronger, something wiser. and, you know, I thought that turning 40 might have been the halfway mark, but maybe 50's the halfway mark. Maybe I'm going to go 100. You never know. I mean, I look better than Wilford Brimley at 50. No offense. But, yeah, that bar is low, but yeah, go ahead. You know, so I might have, I might have a lot more to go here. And it was a seven-year cycle. It was just a bad dream. It was one of

one of the cycles and I'm through it. And now it's time to really start living my life with purpose. And so I would say to people out there, I know it's hard to say like, give into it or whatever, you know, but like you got to go through what you have to go through. You have to deal, you have to play those cards out that you got dealt. You don't have any other cards. And so try to play those cards the best as you can. For me, it would have been a relief to be able to check out and die.

But I didn't. That wasn't for me. But, you know, here I am on the other side of it. And life's pretty damn good. I got to move back home. Living in Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh again. You know, the entertainment industry kind of moved a bit.

A fiance. You got like, you know. Great fiancé who loves me. You got all these projects. Yeah. Work came back. One piece. And yeah, I found out I love game show hosting and writing more.

and I'm a chief creative officer at Dungeons and drags, which is the job that I wanted as a kid, and I get to do that and develop product with them. And then I have, you know. We got bubbles here. Like, we went the whole, we've gone like three hours without even really addressing the fact that we've got bubbles in the house on your lap. Who's behaved herself beautifully the whole time. Yeah, they're great.

Unreal, this symbiotic, like, healing relationship that you, that the two of you have with each other. Got to save a little dog. I would tell people go get a dog if you're suffering. You know, that's another thing that got to be of service to this little monster. There she is. What are you doing? Well, it's been an absolute honor, dude.

Just unbelievable story. So powerful. Again, I appreciate you. I mean, dude, we hung out like an entire day. Yeah. Like, I just, what a gift. A lot in common. me and that you're given to other people. The book is incredible stuff, bloodlines available everywhere.

And dude, I can't wait to see where you're going to take this and where this is going to lead you. It's really a remarkable journey. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. Peace.