'Harry Potter's' Tom Felton talks escape from rehab in book

A man wearing a tuxedo stands in front of greenery

By Nardine SaadStaff Writer

Oct. 18, 2022 1:19 PM PT

“Harry Potter” actor Tom Felton recounts his struggles with substance abuse and mental health issues in his just-released memoir, which details how he once fled rehab on his road to sobriety.

The 35-year-old British star is best known for playing Harry Potter’s longtime nemesis Draco Malfoy in the eight-film franchise and unpacks a lot of that in his new book, “Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard.” Sure, there’s a Hogwarts-sized number of behind-the-scenes stories about him working on thedecade-long franchise since age 13, but that’s not the point. Felton said he also wrote the candid memoir to help normalize therapy and remove stigmas around mental health.

“Which takes us back to the concept of rehab, and the stigma attached to the word,” Felton wrote. “By no means do I want to casualize the idea of therapy — it’s a difficult first step to take — but I do want to do my bit to normalize it. I think we all need it in one shape or another, so why wouldn’t it be normal to talk openly about how we’re feeling?”

In the book, released Tuesday by Grand Central Publishing, Felton shares that his friends and then-girlfriend once staged an intervention over his alcoholism, which he said had evolved from him “being not particularly interested” in booze to “regularly having a few pints a day before the sun had even gone down, and a shot of whiskey to go with each of them.”

“The alcohol, though, wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom. The problem was deeper,” Felton wrote, explaining that his mental health was suffering.

Feeling pressured after the “painful and humiliating” intervention, Felton checked into a rehab facility in Malibu but fled less than 24 hours later because he felt like he didn’t belong there among patients who seemed to have problems worse than his. So he wandered out of the facility and sojourned down Pacific Coast Highway to make his way to Barney’s Beanery, the famous bar he frequented in West Hollywood. The night, he wrote, “led to certain epiphanies that would change my life for the better.”

Upon leaving rehab and becoming “completely sober for the first time in ages,” Felton said he “had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger,” screamed and burst into tears, all while being “muddy, wet, disheveled and broken.”

That night, he encountered three men — an elderly gas station cashier, an Uber driver and a Barney’s bouncer — whom he refers to “as my three kings,” because they each showed him an act of kindness on his odyssey to the bar and his overall journey toward sobriety.

“I’d spent the night searching for my way back home, and I’d come to the realization that I wasn’t there yet,” he wrote. “The intervention had been upsetting. It had angered and confused me. But I was beginning to understand that it came from the right place and I needed to seek some help. I was going to do it for myself.”

He soon tried another rehab facility in “the California countryside” that helped bring back the “rigorous structure” he had thrived on as a child actor. But, he revealed, he was unceremoniously kicked out after being found in a girl’s room.

At 31, he crashed on a yoga mat on the floor of his friend’s place in Venice for a few months, then bought his own beach shack and adopted a dog named Willow, which helped for a time, but “the numbness returned, without any warning and with no particular trigger,” a few years later. That’s when he decided to try rehab again of his own accord.

“I fought the notion of rehab the first time round. But this wasn’t the same me. I’d grown to accept my genetic predisposition to these changes of mood, rather than refusing to acknowledge them. I relinquished all command and, with a little help from my friends, I found somewhere I could seek help,” he wrote in the book’s final chapter.

“I can honestly say it was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. But the very fact that I was able to admit to myself that I needed some help — and I was going to do something about it — was an important moment,” Felton wrote. “I am no longer shy of putting my hands up and saying: I’m not okay.”

“I am not alone in having these feelings,” he added. “Just as we all experience physical ill-health at some stage in our lives, so we all experience mental ill-health too. There’s no shame in that. It’s not a sign of weakness.”

“The Flash” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” actor said that he wrote the memoir based on stories he wrote down over the years that were raised by questions he would frequently receive at conventions. And it was his “Harry Potter” co-star Emma Watson, who played Harry’s best friend, Hermione Granger, who inspired him to share the deeper details of his rehabilitation. (Watson also penned the book’s foreword.)

“Emma was a big force of encouragement to be like, ‘This will resonate with people,’” Felton told USA Today. “It wouldn’t really seem right just to talk about all the fluffy stuff. ... After encouragement, I was given a bit more confidence in myself to go, ‘You know what? This happened, and this is part of my life.’”

In the book, Felton recounts his rocky first meeting with Watson when she was 9 and speaks fondly of their friendly relationship throughout, describing their “unspoken” bond thusly: “I remember using the familiar old line: ‘I love her like a sister.’ But there was more to it than that. I don’t think I was ever in love with Emma, but I loved and admired her as a person in a way that I could never explain to anybody else.”

Last year, Watson admitted to having a crush on Felton when they shot the “Harry Potter” movies.