Charlie Sheen and "little maggot" Chuck Lorre are apparently friends again

Twelve years after Charlie Sheen very publicly, and very explosively, departed Chuck Lorre’s Two And A Half Men—dubbing Lorre a “stupid, stupid man,” a “low-rent, nut-less sociopath,” “a little maggot,” and much, much more in the process—Sheen and his favorite bug are working together again. This is per Variety, which ran a piece today talking about Lorre’s decision to cast his long-estranged old friend in his new Max show Bookie, saying that, every time he and co-creator Nick Bakay turned to a “TBA” celebrity cameo they’d written into the script for the series’ pilot, Lorre’s mind told him “It should be Charlie.”

Somewhat amazingly, Sheen—who has continued to be alive in the real world, despite having had a literal piano dropped on his head in the series finale of Two And A Half Men—agreed to come back and play himself for the part, making only one request of Lorre: While he was fine with being mocked for his various foibles, and even being shown running a poker game out of a rehab facility in the show’s pilot, he asked that it not be because he was currently in treatment there, with Lorre noting that, “He was kind of like, ‘can we not do the drug-addled Charlie anymore?’”

Lorre agreed, and so Sheen signed on for a recurring guest role on the show, which is based in part on Bakay’s experiences in the sports betting world, and which stars Sebastian Maniscalco in its lead role. As for Sheen and Lorre, they apparently fell back into an easy rhythm with each other: “I was nervous,” Lorre admits, “But almost as soon as we started talking, I remembered, we were friends once. And that friendship just suddenly seemed to be there again. I don’t want to be too mawkish about it, but it was healing. And he was also totally game to make fun of himself. When he came to the table read of that episode, I walked up, and we hugged. It was just great.”

Now: Is this public reconciliation made somewhat easier by the fact that Sheen himself is literally blocked from publicly unleashing his own perspective on things by the SAG-AFTRA rules on actors promoting their work right now? Sure—although series co-creator Bakay was upfront about the fact that there’s a whiff of publicity stunt to this, acknowledging that, “There’s an exploitive level to it, which is, it’s kind of fantastic for our first episode. But,” he adds, “There’s a bigger part of it, and this is what really is my takeaway throughout all of it: Through all the carnage, these guys made beautiful music together. And Charlie’s really good. There was that realization of like, Yeah, this is one of the best comedy actors. And it was like watching a guy in batting practice grooving balls over the fences again.”