Charlie Sheen regrets ‘ruining’ his hit show ‘Two and a Half Men’
Charlie Sheen has few regrets — but “ruining” his hit sitcom “Two and a Half Men” is one of them.
Sheen let that slip when he returned to the “Today” show Tuesday, seven months after going public with his HIV-positive status. The 50-year-old actor said it was like being “released from prison” last November when he shared his secret on the show.
This time, at Matt Lauer’s urging, the onetime party warlock — who has said he’s lived a life without regrets — shared another secret: There actually are a few things in his life he wishes he’d done differently.
“I regret not using a condom the one or two times when this whole thing happened. I regret ruining ‘Two and a Half Men.’ I regret not being more involved in my children’s lives growing up, which I am now,” Sheen said. “That’s about it.”
Another likely regret that didn’t make the short list: going to Mexico for an experimental HIV treatment right around the new year. His viral load went from zero to 7,000 as a result of stopping the meds that had been working, he said Tuesday, but it since has returned to undetectable levels.
“That didn’t go so well,” Sheen said. “That man is a criminal. He’s a charlatan. He’s hurting a lot of good and decent people.”
The actor is on another experimental treatment now, this time as part of a U.S. clinical trial of a drug that’s injected once a week and replaces the cocktail of pills he’s been successful with thus far.
Everyone that I had told up to that moment had shaken me down.”
— Charlie Sheen, on why he didn’t tell two partners he was HIV-positive
“The changes — it’s not just physical, but it’s psychological. It’s emotional,” he said. “There’s no depression; there’s no shades of dementia. This is the future of treatment, what I’m doing now.”
Sheen and Lauer also got down to brass tacks as the host tried to nail down his guest about whether he’d told the truth in November about telling his partners about his HIV status. The actor admitted there were two times he hadn’t volunteered that information, but said “protection was always in place.”
Taking a page from the reality-TV playbook, Sheen explained he’d lied by omission to his partners “for the right reasons.”
“Because,” he said, “everyone that I had told up to that moment had shaken me down.”
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Follow Christie D’Zurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.
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