From Tom Holland and Bradley Cooper to Demi Lovato and Jamie Lee Curtis, stars share their stories on sobriety and how they turned their lives around.
Getting sober may not be easy, but there are those aren’t afraid to tell their tale.
Stars like Tom Holland, Bradley Cooper and Demi Lovato have been honest about their sobriety journeys, candidly detailing their past struggles with addiction and what—or who—ultimately drove them to seek help.
For the A Star Is Born director, who abused cocaine and alcohol during the early aughts, his wake-up call came in the form of Will Arnett. As he recalled during a 2022 appearance on the Arrested Development alum’s Smartless podcast, he had no idea he was on a self-destructive path until Arnett confronted him about acting like a “real a–hole” at a dinner party with friends.
“That was the first time I ever realized I had a problem with drugs and alcohol,” Cooper shared. “He took that risk of having a hard conversation with me that put me on a path of deciding to change my life.”
And in getting sober and being open, the actor went on to help Brad Pitt on his own journey.
“I got sober because of this guy,” Pitt told the audience after Cooper presented him with a trophy at the 2020 National Board of Review Annual Awards. “And every day’s been happier ever since.”
The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star battled addictions to both alcohol and cannabis before changing his lifestyle, a journey he admitted is never-ending. “I’m really happy it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I’ve got my feelings in my fingertips again,” he told GQ Style in 2017. “I think that’s part of the human challenge: You either deny them all of your life or you answer them and evolve.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Lovato, who relapsed in 2018 and became addicted to heroin, resulting in a near-fatal overdose.
“Sobriety is what works for me and nothing else,” the singer—who now abstains from drugs and alcohol—told Alternative Press in 2022. “My story’s not done.”
From Jamie Lee Curtis to Anne Hathaway, keep reading for more celeb sobriety stories.
The Spider-Man: No Way Home star stopped drinking alcohol in 2022 after feeling “enslaved” to the drink. “I was definitely addicted to alcohol, not shying away from that at all,” Holland recalled on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast. “I think that anyone that has a beer everyday has probably got a little bit of a problem.”
“And then you would just reach that moment where you’re like ‘Wow, I shouldn’t have had that last beer,'” the actor continued. “And you wake up the next day and you have a terrible headache.”
Since making the lifestyle change, Holland noticed he “could sleep better” and “handle problems better.”
“Things that would go wrong on set that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride,” he shared. “I had so much such better mental clarity. I felt healthier. I felt fitter.”
Alec Baldwin
The star of Hunt for Red October does not often speak to his sobriety journey, which began almost forty years ago.
“I don’t discuss this a lot,” he said during a May 2024 podcast appearance. “I discuss it every now and then when it makes sense. I’m 39 years sober. I got sober Feb. 23, 1985.”
Speaking about his life after moving from New York City to Los Angeles in 1983, Alec explained, “I had a white-hot problem every day for two years. I think I snorted a line of cocaine from here to Saturn. We took it back home. I mean, cocaine was like coffee back then. Everybody was doing it all day long.”
And after quitting the drug, he soon turned to alcohol—only to also quit that dependency.
Today, he relies on the city around him.
“New York relaxes me,” he shared of his home. “I walk around and I see aspects of it that I’ve never seen before. I’ll look at a building and I’ll go, ‘My God, I never noticed that about that building, those doors.’ I have lunches and coffee and my friends.”
Anne Hathaway
The Princess Diaries alum shared in April 2024 that she is more than five years sober. As she told the New York Times, “That feels like a milestone to me.”
Her reasoning was clear. “I knew deep down it wasn’t for me,” she shared. “And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none?’ But none. If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.”
And she’s happy she made that decision. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better,” she continued. “For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow.”
Liam Payne
In May 2023, the One Direction alum celebrated being 100 days sober.
“I feel amazing,” he said at the time. “I feel really, really good, and support from the fans and everything has been really, really good.”
His battle began during the height of 1D mania. “The problem we had in the band—and I don’t blame anybody for this…But it feels to me like, when we were in the band, the best way to secure us, because of how big it got, was to just lock us in a room. And, of course, what is in the room? A minibar,” Liam shared. “So at a certain point, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to have a party for one,’ and that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life.”
Throughuot, he’s been candid about his sobriety. “It was only until I saw myself after that I was like, ‘All right, I need to fix myself,'” he recalled in June 2021 when he said he was more than one month sober at the time. “It was like a few pictures of me on a boat and I’m all, like, bloated out, and I call it pills-and-booze face….My face was just like 10 times more than it is now. And I just didn’t like myself very much, so then I made a change.”
While accepting the 2018 Woman of the Year Award by the Peggy Albrecht Friendly House, a residential program for women recovering from substance and alcohol abuse, Moore spoke about the “self-destructive path” that nearly derailed her career.
“I feel like there’s a defining moments in our lives that shape who we are and the direction we go and early in my career, I was spiraling down a path of real self-destruction and no matter what successes I had, I just never felt good enough,” the star recalled. “I had absolutely no value for myself and this self-destructive path, it very quickly brought me to a real crisis point and it wasn’t clear at the time the reason. Maybe it was divine intervention.”
Moore, who sought treatment in 2012, thanked two unnamed people she “barely knew” for delivering something of an ultimatum to her to turn her life around. “Unless I was dead, I better show up,” she quipped, adding that she was given “a chance to redirect the course of my life before I destroyed everything.”
“Clearly they saw more of me than I saw of myself,” Moore noted. “And I’m so grateful because without that opportunity, without their believing me, I wouldn’t be standing here today.”
The late Friends star revealed in 2022 that he had spent about $9 million trying to get sober after getting hooked on alcohol and drugs at a young age. His addiction struggles began at age 14, when he started drinking Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck, before he started dabbling in drugs like Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin.
“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said in a 2022 profile in The New York Times, marking 18 months of sobriety. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick.”
He noted, “I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”
Cyrus shared in 2022 that she’s been in recovery for her Xanax addiction since 2020. “It gave me so much structure in the time that I really needed structure, because I didn’t want to just be sitting around and stirring in my brain,” she told Rolling Stone. “It gave me hope.”
The singer added, “Once I felt that it was possible to silence things out for a second and numb your pain, it was over.”
She said her friends at the time “kind of cosigned” her drug use and “it just kind of becomes this dark pit, bottomless pit.” But, during the pandemic, Cyrus said she was noticing challenges and felt she wasn’t emotionally present. “I was completely nodding off and falling asleep,” she recalled. “And unable to keep my head up or keep my eyes open, because I was so far gone.”
She eventually sought help and noted that “it took some time to get on my own two feet.”
The Parenthood alum was sober for 16 years before relapsing in 2020 by taking Vicodin after a motorcycle accident.
“For the last eight weeks maybe, I don’t really know…I’m on them all day,” he said on his Armchair Expert podcast. “And I’m allowed to be on them at some dosage because I have a prescription and then I’m also augmenting that.”
“And I hate it,” he continued. “And I’m lying to other people. And I know I have to quit. But my tolerance is going up so quickly that I’m now in a situation where I’m taking, you know, eight 30s a day, and I know that’s an amount that’s going to result in a pretty bad withdrawal. And I start getting really scared, and I’m starting to feel really lonely. And I just have this enormous secret.”
Jamie Lee Curtis
In 2018, the Halloween star got very candid about her 10-year addiction to opiates, which began in the late ’80s after a minor plastic surgery “for my hereditary puffy eyes.” The reslt was a prescription that changed her life. “I had a 10-year run, stealing, conniving,” she told People. “No one knew. No one.”
When her sister visited her in the summer of 1998 and brought along prescribed painkillers for a rib injury, Curtis said she hit her rock bottom. “I knew she had them in her suitcase in our guest room closet,” she told the publication, crying at the memory. “I basically took all her opiates. When she was leaving I knew she would pack her suitcase and find her pills missing. I knew I had to acknowledge to her what I had done, and so I wrote her a note and left it on her suitcase. I came home that day, and she put her arms around me and told me she loved me and she was concerned about me and she was unwilling to watch me kill myself.”
She attended her first meeting on Feb. 3, 1999, the same day she revealed her struggle to her filmmaker husband Christopher Guest. “He was incredulous that he’d never noticed,” Curtis said, adding that she’s been sober ever since.
Barrymore, who previously went to rehab for alcohol and drug addiction, shared in 2021 that she was marking a big milestone in her journey. “I’m just going to say something for the first time in a long time: I have not had a drink of alcohol in two and a half years,” she said on CBS Mornings. “And it was something that I realized just did not serve me in my life.”
She added, “It’s so funny. When we reveal ourselves and our truths and the things we’ve worked so hard for, it’s so liberating and vulnerable all at the same time.”
Barrymore later explained to the Los Angeles Times that she doesn’t use the “sober” label because she doesn’t want people to think she’s “some perfect Puritan.”
“I kept thinking, ‘I’ll master this. I’ll figure it out,'” she said in 2023. “And finally, I just realized: ‘You’ve never mastered this, and you never will.'”
The A Star Is Born actor struggled with a cocaine addiction during the early aughts before friend Will Arnett stepped in and confronted him out about his behavior.
“That was the first time I ever realized I had a problem with drugs and alcohol,” Cooper recalled during a 2022 appearance on the Smartless podcast. “I’ll just never forget it.”
Crediting Arnett as “the reason” he went sober, Cooper added, “He took that risk of having a hard conversation with me that put me on a path of deciding to change my life.”
The Fight Club star spent years struggling with alcohol before Cooper helped him get sober. “I got sober because of this guy,” he told the audience at the 2020 National Board of Review Annual Awards after Cooper presented him with a trophy. “And every day’s been happier ever since.”
In September 2023, the Cruel Intentions alum shared on Instagram that this was “the longest I’ve gone since I was a teen without some kind of nicotine or marijuana in my system (among other things).”
“Feeling thankful for the freedom that comes with breaking addictions and dependency on substance,” he added. “Sobriety, clarity, and spiritual connectedness feels real good.”
After publicly celebrating six years of sobriety on tour in 2018, the singer stunned fans later that same year with the release of the confessional single “Sober,” which revealed that she had relapsed.
“Mama, I’m so sorry I’m not sober anymore / And Daddy please forgive me for the drinks spilled on the floor / To the ones who never left me / We’ve been down this road before I’m so sorry, I’m not sober anymore,” she sang.
A month later, Lovato was hospitalized for a near-fatal overdose.
“I have always been transparent about my journey with addiction,” she wrote on Instagram two weeks later. “What I’ve learned is that this illness is not something that disappears or fades with time. It is something I must continue to overcome and have not done yet…I now need time to heal and focus on my sobriety and road to recovery. The love you have all shown me will never be forgotten and I look forward to the day where I can say I came out on the other side. I will keep fighting.”
In 2018, she recalled battling her addictions to sex and alcohol. “My sort of addictions jump. They jump around. When I was younger, I definitely think I had a sex addiction of some kind, yes, that everything could be fixed by sex,” she said, before sharing about the time she realized she’d developed a troubling drinking problem.
“I remember reaching a rock bottom that time I was in the house by myself and I had those two bottles of wine and was going for the third bottle,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Now hold up. You’re in the this house by yourself going onto your third bottle of wine? You might have a problem.'”
“So I went cold turkey. That’s the thing about me: I can go cold turkey. I am a binger, and I always have to watch myself and I can just get obsessed with things,” she continued. “It’s not what you’re doing but how you’re with it. Why you’re doing it. It’s the behavior that’s attached to it because if you want to have a lot of sex, that’s great, but why are you having all that sex? That’s what you’ve got to look at.”
The Backstreet Boys member tried drugs for the first time before filming the music video for 2000’s “The Call,” telling Good Morning America years later that he “was off the walls” during the shoot. He got sober in 2021 and saw numerous positive benefits just one year later, including losing 32 pounds in seven months by cutting out alcohol and fast food.
“Drinking caused weight gain,” he told Today in September 2022, “but it also weighed down my mental state.”
