Harry Potter star Tom Felton has released his memoir, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, in which he details his experiences as a young child actor experiencing fame and fandom. In the book, Felton has also openly discussed his struggles with alcoholism, and said that his addiction to the substance often proved to be a hindrance at work. The actor played the role of Draco Malfoy in the franchise.
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“Drinking becomes a habit at the best of times. When you’re drinking to escape a situation, even more so. The habit spilled out of the bar and, from time to time, on to set. It came to the point where I would think nothing of having a drink while I was working. I’d turn up unprepared, not the professional I wanted to be. The alcohol, though, wasn’t the problem. It was the symptom,” Felton wrote, as quoted by Entertainment Weekly.
Tom said that people close to him, and his team of a lawyer, his agent, manager everybody asked him to quit but he wouldn’t, and couldn’t listen. “Everybody in the room had written me a letter. I listened to Jade (his former girlfriend) and the others as they told me how concerned they were about my behaviour, about my drinking and my substance abuse. I was in no state to hear them.”
But finally, it was his lawyer, the person he barely knew, said something that resonated with him, and made enough of an impact for him to try to sort himself out and get admitted in a rehab. “My lawyer, whom I’d barely ever met face to face, spoke with quiet honesty. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I don’t know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I’ve been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don’t be the twelfth,’” the actor wrote.
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But the actor said he also tried escaping within a day of going to rehab, and it was a process for him to realise what had actually transpired: “I was, I realise now, completely sober for the first time in ages, and I had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger. I started screaming at God, at the sky, at everyone and no one, full of fury for what had happened to me, for the situation in which I found myself. I yelled, full-lung, at the sky and the ocean. I yelled until I’d let it all out, and I couldn’t yell any more.”
Urging those in need to seek out help, Tom wrote that there is ‘no shame’ in taking care of yourself to the best of your abilities, and that mental illness is as normal and common place as a physical illness and should be talked about openly.
