by Tom Sizemore
By the time I was doing Sober House, I’d reentered the world of the living again. I didn’t have anything that real people have anymore—a bank account, a driver’s license, a car, or any of the things that everyone just takes for granted. Damian Sullivan, one of the Rehab producers, went with me to put a lot of those things in place again. We went to the DMV in Van Nuys and got me a license, and he went with me to the bank to open an account. He also came with me to a court appearance in Bakersfield, where the judge told me that if I violated probation one more time, I’d go to prison again.
Everything with Heidi grew even more complicated at the house. Kari Ann continued to be problematic for everyone, and I kept defending her. When it got to the point where people were saying, in front of Kari Ann, that they didn’t want her in the house, my heart went out to her. I went up and comforted her and told everyone to stop jumping on her. That just drove Heidi insane. When I walked down the hall with Kari, Heidi yelled after us that I was a pervert and that Kari Ann and I should both leave.
Eventually, all of Heidi’s jabs got to me and I left the house. Everyone thought I was going to get high but I just wanted to cool off—so I went back to where Monroe was staying and spent the night. I tested clean and thought everything would be okay, but then Heidi kept at it until I completely snapped. I ended up going off on Mike Starr, really just because he was sitting there, and I can’t tell you, especially now that he’s gone, how horrible I feel about that. Heidi and I eventually made up, and some days she’d be incredibly affectionate with me, sitting on my lap and telling me how good I looked. Nobody understood our relationship and, to be honest, I was right there with them. Our relationship was so bizarre to everyone that we actually started talking about doing another reality show together for VH1, one that involved the two of us becoming roommates. I wasn’t entirely serious about the idea, but I was entertaining it, although obviously it never came to fruition—which I think is definitely for the best.
But I had finally walked through that first layer of withdrawal and realized I was willing to do the footwork: to call people and make amends and look at my behavior in an honest way. I had never wanted to do that before. I’d always thought I was better than other people because I wasn’t willing to do that, but really it was the other way around.
I was starting to feel like I was getting it together by the time I was doing Sober House, especially in comparison to some of the other people around. It was complete chaos. As Bob said back then, “When Tom Sizemore’s the sanest person in the house, you know you’ve got a problem.”
I GOT RELEASED into the real world in June 2009, and Drew had suggested I take at least six months off before I started working again. But I wanted to follow Robert Downey Jr.’s recommendation that I hire a sober coach. Robert had said that if a coach helped me to not use even just one time, he’d be worth every dollar, but I knew I’d have to start working again to be able to afford one. Of course, people weren’t exactly lining up outside Las Encinas to hire me, and I was still trying to reacclimate to sober life anyway. I was also single for pretty much the first time in my life. It used to be that even when I was with someone, I had a decent idea of where I was going next. But I knew I had to be alone for a while if I was going to be able to change at all.
Honestly, early sobriety was really hard. Probably my favorite thing about drugs was that I always knew how they were going to make me feel, and I really missed that. My emotions would flare up. I’d be looking for a pair of shoes and not be able to find them and suddenly my thoughts would go, “I probably lost this pair of shoes. Just like I lost my house. Just like I’ve lost everything that mattered to me.” I would catastrophize everything. I’d sit in the back of Bob Forrest’s truck going to meetings and sometimes I’d be thinking, “I hate you, Bob. I hate your hair, I hate your hat, I hate this truck, I hate going to this meeting in the middle of the day.” Still, other days I would go and feel grateful and really proud of my sobriety. But I needed the group to hold me up and help me to be more honest about my feelings. I used to minimize everything and try to act like I was a tough guy, when really I just played tough guys in movies and behaved like one in front of the press because I thought that was what a man did. The truth is that I have always been a softy. And it felt surprisingly good to admit all of this, which is good because the pressure of being the tough guy or the cool guy or the drug guy was exhausting. People were surprised when they found out what I was really like: that I was actually a momma’s boy with a master’s in fine arts who loved Shakespeare.
I’d been around AA rooms since 1991, and the meetings in and around Hollywood never seemed to work for me, so I started going to AA downtown. I knew that people were gossiping about me—“I wonder if he’s really getting high,” that kind of thing. But after a while, that stopped. I started going to a group made up of around twenty-five people, mostly men, and I started going to meetings outside the meeting—coffee and all that. But I saw that there were people in AA who didn’t blend life with sobriety—people whose only friends were their fellow sponsees. Bob told me he thought that was unhealthy—that you have to get back into normal life as much as you can. You can’t be around dangerous people, but you can’t only be around alcoholics in recovery, either, because that’s not really living.
I started hanging out around the Midnight Mission in downtown L.A., going to the AA meeting down there and then staying and volunteering. I somehow felt comfortable there in a way that I didn’t in Hollywood AA. No one down there cares about how you look or where you’ve been. The homeless people down there are completely forgotten about by society, and I really felt for them. And taking the focus off me and putting it on them changed my perception of things. I began to see how truly lucky I was.
Bob would tell me I had to do sobriety the way he did it and the way he helped Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Kiedis to do it, by going to this specific meeting he’s been going to for fifteen years. He’d say that going to that meeting and feeling uncomfortable would do more for me than going down to the Mission and talking to those guys. But I did it my way, and it worked. I used to think going to a meeting was a big deal—I fought it for so long—but it’s an hour long and it’s easy once you get in the rhythm of it. It’s just like anything else in life: you can make it into a good habit in the same way that you can make doing drugs into a bad habit. And it takes a lot less time to stay clean than it does to stay high. Even just getting the dope was a full-time job.
Once I got really organized and was doing all my AA and therapy things, I would finish everything I had to by two in the afternoon, unless I was going to go to an evening meeting, and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. So I would call Drew and say, “I’ve done everything—went to a meeting, volunteered, and met with my sponsor—and still have nine hours before bed, so what should I do?” At one point he said, “You’re going to need to get a hobby.” I said, “What’s a hobby?” And he said, “Tom, please.” But I was serious; I really didn’t know. I’d never done anything for fun, for years, besides drugs. I like to play football, or even just throw a football against a wall, but I take it so seriously that that doesn’t really feel like a hobby, either. He said, “A hobby is something you don’t do for any kind of money and is ideally not competitive. It’s something that’s all positive and fun—where you’re not trying to be better than the next guy.” So I said, “How about the guitar?”
Although I’d been in a band before—Day 8—I didn’t play an instrument; I just sang. And it’s not like I really learned how to play guitar really well or anything. I mostly just sat there like a bump on a log unless someone gave me something to play. Of course, nowadays you don’t have to play an instrument to be a musician—you just have to have a six-pack and a couple of arrests and you can be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I did start to miss the band, though. My former guitar player, Rod Castro, had become a really popular session guitarist and my bass player, Tyrone Tomke, had s
tarted scoring a lot of TV shows. And it was because I kept getting arrested that the band dissolved. We had thirty-eight songs and actually produced a four-song demo that got some attention. But since that was over, it was nice to still be musical, and I enjoyed screwing around on the guitar.
I also spent a lot of time around Bob Forrest. We didn’t go on fishing trips or to clubs or anything like that, either: all we did was go to meetings and bookstores and Amoeba Music, and all we’d talk about was sobriety. Drug counseling is an imperfect science, and Bob has his own style, but what’s great about him is he’s just so curious about everything, which makes him a good counselor. He told me once, “Tom, you have no idea why people do drugs—every week someone gives me a new reason, and it will blow my mind.” I see his job mostly as someone who sees through the bullshit. He’s somehow able to tell when people are lying and also when they really want to get sober, which is a great gift.
A lot of getting sober involved becoming sane for the first time in a long time, and a lot of that involved realizing that I couldn’t control what other people did. I couldn’t control what Heidi did, and I couldn’t control what Drew wanted me to do or what my mom was thinking or what someone who interviewed me was going to write. All I could control, I saw, was my reactions to these things.
I also realized that I couldn’t really control how I felt a lot of the time. All I could do was remind myself that things change. I used to have a false sense of security that I could control things, but I saw that I couldn’t even control my own kids. I could give them a “time-out” if they did something bad, but I wasn’t necessarily going to be there later to know whether they were going do whatever it was again with their mom or her parents. I could only say to the boys, “I don’t approve, but I love you.”
When you’re using drugs and it gets bad, you blame everybody but yourself. You forget that there are decent people out there rooting for you. But suddenly I was encountering people who were walking up to me with tears in their eyes—strangers who would say, “Oh my God, you’re alive. You made it. You look good!” Of course, there are a lot of mean people and horrible things that have been said, but I could finally see the great things, too. You lose sight of that when you’re using drugs—you just think everybody’s an asshole, everybody’s against you, and the world sucks. And it’s just not true.
I started to see how immature I’d been and how much I’d been coddled in my life. I saw with incredible clarity the extreme permissiveness that is given to successful actors and how, because of that, you can become a monster before you even know it. I used to think the idea of “surrendering”—as they say in the program—was garbage. I used to say that something about it didn’t feel right. But I think it was more fear of doing it that made me say that. But even when I finally surrendered, it was still hard. It certainly didn’t mean that the difficult times were over.
Of course, my regrets about what I should have done differently began seeping into my thoughts along with all the new recovery thoughts. I never really defended myself during those years when I was doing nothing but getting in trouble, because when I did talk, I made an ass of myself. I was falsely accused, intoxicated all the time, and being hounded, and I’d never been in that situation before so I didn’t know what the protocol was. I’d learned in playing sports as a kid that if you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything. But I’d get high and then forget I’d decided not to do anything. I just wish I’d gotten some kind of advice about what to do, about how to address the accusations in a sane way, instead of doing what I did—which, at times, was to start mocking the police. Before all the bad stuff started happening, I always liked the police. I’d played them a lot in movies and knew them from researching roles and riding around with them. In getting clean, at least I started to repair some of those relationships.
I also started to repair my relationships with my family. My mom had stood by me the whole time, and she did her best to not make me feel any worse than I already did. She has this kind of funny thing she does where she says “delete” if you bring up something unpleasant. If I brought up prison, she’d say, “Oh, Tommy, I deleted that a long time ago. I deleted all the years you were in trouble. I don’t know what happened. Ask me anything.” I said, “Do you remember when I went to trial?” and she said, “Nope, delete.”
In a lot of ways, I’ve actually been able to even forgive Heidi, even when she was saying crummy things to me on television. It was hard to hear those things, but I know she only said them because she was hurt. I’m not interested in revenge. Obviously, I wish that whole thing had never happened, but you can’t reverse time. In my ideal world, she would go to the press and say “He never hit me.” Then I would have true closure. But that’s not going to happen.
But I realized that I had to forgive people because I still hoped to be forgiven for a lot of the things that I’d done. I shot heroin while making Heat, which was irresponsible. It ended up not hurting the movie, but that’s just a fluke. It could have affected thousands of people—the crew, Michael Mann, the other actors—but I never thought of it that way.
In the early days of sobriety, I’d sometimes wish I were still in rehab—say, the fifth month when you’re feeling great and can get up and do the daily meditation and then run five miles. I do well with a schedule, which is why movies are good for me, since you have to be somewhere at a certain time. But when I became responsible, I’d have to fight the temptation to lie in bed, knowing I had to get up for a meeting and that I wouldn’t have time to work out before and I’d never work out after because it’d be too late and I’d then want to do some creative work and take a walk and throw the football. I’d be stressed before I’d gotten out of bed, and I wouldn’t even technically have anything to do.
But after a while, I knew it was time to start trying to do all that I’d ever wanted to do: to act again. Robert Downey had warned me that you get in a position where you’re sober and you really want everything back again, but you’re worried that if you do get it back, you’re only going to get fucked-up again because suddenly you once more have access to money and everything else that goes with it. But I understood that I wouldn’t know unless I tried, and it was time to try.
ONE OF THE first movies that I did once I got clean again was called White Knight. The title was changed to Cellmates along the way, but when I was doing it, it was called White Knight. It was a comedy about the KKK, and while those things don’t normally go together, the cowriter and director, Jesse Baget, is a true talent, and he was able to pull it off.
My character in that movie goes through an evolution not unlike my own. He transitions from being this very shut-down, hateful, racist southern man to a sort of 1967 Summer of Love hippie who falls in love—and it’s all funny, if you can believe it. There’s a part when one of the characters hands my character a note that says, “Anybody can change, but only if they really, really want to,” and when I first read the script, I just started crying, because it’s so true. It made me realize that we all get second chances—some people, like me, even get nineteen chances.
The opportunity came along at the right time, because I really thought I’d ruined my career and was actually thinking about trying to work as a drug counselor. Bob had said he thought I could have a future in it. I honestly didn’t know what else I could do since I didn’t have many traditionally marketable skills or interests. All I’ve ever really liked to do is read, see movies, look at art, and be around people, which doesn’t exactly make you very viable in the working world.
The script was 116 pages of pure dialogue, and I was in every single scene. The first reading didn’t go very well because I was nervous, so then Jesse and I spent about four solid days together, just talking about the script and watching movies like Raising Arizona and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? to try to get into the tone of the movie. It can sometimes take me a little while to warm up to doing the work, which gave us time to just sort of hang out and bond. We’d toss a football ba
ck and forth on the roof and keep talking.
We shot for thirteen days in downtown L.A. The way I work is I learn my dialogue but then wait to really perform it when the director says “Action.” So I don’t really have a chance to see how it works until the first take. Because of that I stumbled a bit on the first takes, but then would nail it on the second.
The movie walks a fine line and I was a little scared that I was going too big with the character. I’d ask Jesse, “Are you sure we’re not going a little too broad with this?” He’d say, “No, trust me”—so I did. Being funny in a movie is hard. Timing and delivery is everything. You also need to be with other people who are funny, and Jesse created the right atmosphere for that.
Jesse told me that I added a lot more emotion to the role than he’d expected me to—that in my first speech about all the hardships I’d suffered as a Klan member, I grounded the character so much that you actually feel for the guy, rather than just hearing a speech that was actually intended to be funny and sort of facetious.
Because I was so focused and trying so hard to prove myself, I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep over those two weeks, and I actually fell asleep when we were shooting these scenes of me lying down in jail. But I’d just wake up and keep going. One of the amazing realizations I had while doing that movie was that I was facile again—meaning that if I thought a scene should go a certain way and it started to go another way, I’d be able to transition with ease. I was very rigid with my acting when I was using because I just wanted to get through the scenes, and I used to have this attitude when acting of “If it’s a square peg, I’m going to fit it in this round hole—I’ll make it work, goddamn it.”
When I could afford to, I hired a sober companion—this Nazi-type guy with long hair who would say things like “You’ve got to do what I tell you to do—I’m not here to play.” He wasn’t a lot of fun but he was still a very nice man. And people started to get less worried about hiring me. I’d have a physical before a shoot and have my blood taken, which would show I was clean. You can fake a lot of things but you can’t fake blood.
