(Note: I wrote this a while ago. I should have posted it by now, but well, today seems as appropriate of a day as I'm going to get now I have left it so late. Enjoy)
A lot happened in 2011.
Where to even begin? We had natural disasters, of all kinds, on every corner of the globe. We had Navy SEAL Team 6. We had (and still have) a European banking crisis to rival the American version from three years ago. We had Will and Kate ruin the lives of future grooms worldwide by having the best wedding possible. We had protests, riots, planking, Rebecca Black, and finally a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. We had (and take a breath for this one) an earthquake cause a tsunami cause a nuclear disaster cause a wide-spread power shortage. We lost Oprah (to retirement), Steve Jobs (passed away) and Kim Jong-Il (working too hard). We still have no idea what the hell happened at News of the World.
And yet, despite all of the above and so, so much more happening over the last 12 months, for me 2011 still belongs to one man.
Charlie Sheen.
Now 46, Sheen didn't burst out of obscurity to our television screens for the first time this year. Indeed, he had been the highest paid TV actor ($1.8 million per episode) at the time of his well-publicized career shift after 8 seasons of playing a character based on himself in the CBS hit comedy Two and a Half Men. And well before that sitcom first went to air in 2003, Charlie was already one of Hollywood's bigger stars. We all remember Sheen from Platoon, the original Wall Street, Major League, Spin City and more recently the Scary Movie franchise.
But his off-screen career has been even more impressive.
Three marriages. Five children. An accidental shooting of fiance in 1990. (Surprisingly, they called off the wedding.) He dated an uncountable number of porn stars, sometimes at the same time. He was the key witness in the Heidi Fleiss trial. Think about that for a moment. The key witness. In a prostitution case. Impressive.
He was arrested in 1997 after assaulting his then-girlfriend Brittany Ashland. In what would become a running theme in Sheen's life, he did not serve any jail time. Sheen's first cocaine overdose, (that we know about) was in 1998. Sheen was already on probation for a previous drug offence, and for a domestic violence offence, but still avoided jail time, instead entering a rehab centre. Years later, he would admit the overdose was caused by injecting cocaine for the first time. (Apparently, he didn't read the directions before showing up to the party that night.) In 2005, Sheen threatened his second wife, and they promptly divorced. He again avoided jail time, and had clearly learned his lesson by 2009, when he was arrested for assaulting Brooke Mueller, his third wife. Once again, he avoided jail time. (Proving once-and-for-all he has the best legal team on the planet.) A year later, he was removed from a hotel suite and arrested after causing $7,000 of damage in a single alcohol and cocaine-filled night. He, not surprisingly, did not serve any jail time. The man even had two porn stars living in with him and his wife. How he managed to pull that off will be, to me at least, is the single greatest mystery of the decade.
But that was before The Leap.
Think about that for a second.
In 2011, Sheen inexplicably raised the bar even further. After a 36-hour Las Vagas bender with three women all taking inordinate amounts of cocaine... Sheen rocked up to work on time that Tuesday. After being hospitalized a few weeks later with an apparent overdose, he checked himself into rehab, halting production of Two and a Half Men. He then admitted on The Dan Patrick Show that when he isn't taking drugs, he is "bored out of his tree." He then created his own talk show rumour, promised to return to Men if the guy who created the show left, and then, on the greatest day of my life thus far, Sheen gave That Interview on Good Morning America on March 1st.
The interview became a cult classic before it even finished. It was trending on Twitter for days. Viewer, after viewer, after viewer watched it on YouTube. Direct quotes were posted between friends all over the internet. We all heard our now-favourite term of all time, 'Winning!' get used for the first time. How did Charlie respond to a text message from a news station asking if he would fight to regain custody of his kids? "Born ready. Winning"
Sheen immediately knew what he had created, and capitalised on his newfound stardom with his "My Voilent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat in Not An Option Show." After a shaky start, the tour was well-received. I even bought a Charlie Sheen-inspired t-shirt, setting me back a cool (and, looking back on it, ridiculous) $75. Sheen was even roasted on Comedy Central, which was once of the greatest specials of the whole year.
And yet, everything comes back to That Interview. In a short, 6 minute segment on ABC, Charlie changed the world. Of course he did.
Just in case you don't want to watch the whole thing, E:O has complied our 10 favourite quotes. Yes, 10 quotes from a 6 minute interview. It was that good.
Thank you, Charlie Sheen, for your 2011. Here's to an even better 2012.
Charlie Sheen Top 10 Good Morning America Interview Quotes
10. "When you see how I party... Man, it was epic. The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards.. all of them just look like droopy eyed armless children.
9. "I blinked and I cured my brain!"
8. "Now there are certain blends I will not entertain, because that's how people go down. I'm too smart to do that. I'm sorry for the guys that happened to, but you should have read the directions before showing up to the party."
7. "You borrow my brain for like 5 seconds, and just be like 'Dude, can't handle it unplug this bastard!'"
6. "Occasionally a giant, marquee name comes through on your caller ID, and it's like - winning!"
5. "I'm proud of what I created. It was radical!"
4. "I got Tiger Blood man. Dying's for fools."
3. "I'm bi-winning. I win here and I win there. Now what?"
2. "The last time I took drugs, I probably took more than anybody could survive. I was banging 7-gram rocks and finishing them, because that's how I roll. I have one gear, one speed, GO!"
1. "Can't is the cancer of happen. The Nike slogan doesn't say just try it. No, Just Do It, man."
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