Nick Stahl opens up about his struggles with addiction and how it derailed his career
The Terminator 3 star says he had to quit acting and focus on getting sober before he became unemployable
In 2012, actor Nick Stahl—still probably best known for starring in Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines—was reported missing by his then-wife, who had said that she hadn’t seen him five days. Stahl’s struggles with drug addiction were becoming a Hollywood talking point at that time, and the last place he had reportedly been seen before disappearing was Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood. He was found a few days later, alive, and entered a treatment center for rehab.
Stahl remained largely absent from the movie business after that, returning only relatively recently with films like Hunter Hunter, and now The Hollywood Reporter has published an extensive interview with Stahl in which he talks about his struggles to get sober and how his drug and alcohol addictions completely derailed his acting career. It’s pretty bleak stuff that really hammers in the idea that Hollywood can be an absolutely monstrous machine, but the upside is that Stahl really does seem to be doing okay now.
Stahl says that he had a lot of social anxiety as a kid, but when he first started acting on stage, he realized that it made him feel more comfortable with himself. He eventually went to L.A. and worked with Mel Gibson on The Man Without A Face, and as a 13-year-old he tried alcohol for the first time. He tells THR that it was like a “spiritual experience” because it made all of his tension and uncomfortability go away.
That led to pills and street drugs like cocaine and meth, with Stahl saying he “never had a brake pedal with it” because it wasn’t that he wanted to do drugs “to have fun,” he felt like he needed drugs. One of the more harrowing sections in the interview involves the making of Larry Clark’s Bully, where Stahl starred opposite Brad Renfro—who died a few years later of a drug overdose. Stahl says he recognized that Renfro’s addiction was “more severe” than his own but knew that he was also on “a runaway train that he was powerless to stop.”
Stahl tried rehab and left L.A. for a while, meeting his ex-wife and having a daughter, but he returned to L.A. eventually. That’s when the “missing on Skid Row” incident happened, with Stahl saying he was never actually homeless but that he chose to live on the streets for a while because he was staying at a sober living house and wanted to do drugs.
He says he also realized at that point that he was totally “checked out” from acting and struggled to get to set on time. He knew that developing a reputation for being unreliable would permanently destroy his career, so he stepped away and did other things for work while trying to get sober. Stahl says he worked at a moving company and a coffee shop in New York, adding that it was “surprisingly empowering” to have to figure out how to do regular jobs where people sometimes recognized him.
Now four years sober, Stahl says that being away from acting—and accepting that addiction isn’t his fault, or something that makes him “morally dysfunctional or defective”—helped remind him why he loves it. “I don’t take it for granted, ever,” he says to THR. “I work much harder at it now. I just feel a renewed love for it.”