Amanda Bynes gets emotionally naked in her most recent, “break the internet,” interview with Paper magazine.
Danielle Levitt/PAPER
She got her start as a child star on Nickelodeon and continued her acting career with hits like What a Girl Wants and Sydney White. In her tell-all interview she reveals her issues with her body image, which ultimately started her off behavior, was when she saw herself in the 2006 flick, She’s the Man. She dressed in drag for the role of a girl pretending to be a man to play college soccer.
“When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy. I’ve never told anyone that,” she told Paper. She explained that seeing herself white short hair and made up to look like a man was, “a super strange and out-of-body experience.”
Her issues with body image only got worse when she starred in Hairspray in 2007. The movie largely about accepting who you are and being fearless, but her character was all about image and an antagonist to the main character. Around that time, Bynes remembers reading an article about Adderall. The article called it the, “new skinny pill.” Side effects of the stimulant used to treat ADHD included loss of appetite and weight loss. “They were talking about how women were taking it to stay thin. I was like, ‘Well, I have to get my hands on that,” she revealed.
She admitted to faking the symptoms of ADD to get a psychiatrist to prescribe her the medication. In 2010 when she began working on Hall Pass, the negative effects of her habits became apparent. “When I was doing Hall Pass, I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [higher that way]. I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines,” said Bynes. She says looking back, she regrets ever taking the pills.
If you read that and thought, “Amanda Bynes wasn’t in Hall Pass,” you are correct. She told the story of her “completely unprofessional” walk-off from the movie.
She was high from her Adderall pills. She caught her reflection in a monitor and recalled thinking, “looked so fat.” In that moment she made the decision to rush off set and never return. She quit the comedy. Yet another thing she completely regrets doing. “It was definitely completely unprofessional of me to walk off and leave them stranded when they’d spent so much money on a set and crew and camera equipment and everything,” she said in the interview.
A few months later she made it out the screening of a the film she had previously worked on, Easy A.
“I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it. I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me,” revealed Bynes. She says that “it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things.” After having a paranoid episode she turned to Twitter to announce she’d be retiring from acting at the ripe age of 24. “If I was going to retire [the right way], I should’ve done it in a press statement—but I did it on Twitter,” she says. “Real classy!” Not holding back any of her feelings about her past she admitted she was “foolish.” “I was young and stupid,” she added.
Time went by and she tried a couple more drugs. She noted she never tried heroin or meth. “I got really into my drug usage,” she told Paper. Her world became, “really dark.”
This is when we started seeing her crazy tweets. “I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would. And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me. It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad,” Bynes says. “Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter…” She was sure to make it clear that it wasn’t Twitter’s fault, she admits, “it was my fault.”
Looking back, when she was high she recalled, “It was like an alien had literally invaded my body.”
Now almost four years sober and her days of experimenting behind her, she is focusing on a bright future. She hopes people can learn from her very public mistakes. “My advice to anyone who is struggling with substance abuse would be to be really careful because drugs can really take a hold of your life. Everybody is different, obviously, but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain. It really made me a completely different person. I actually am a nice person. I would never feel, say or do any of the things that I did and said to the people I hurt on Twitter,” she said to the magazine. She also mentioned that, “certain things that you think are harmless, they may actually affect you in a more harmful way.”
Today, Bynes is continuing her education at L.A.’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, in fact, in her Paper shoot, she is sporting her own top desgin! She is also planning on returning to acting career. To hear what she has to say about that, be sure to pick up the latest issue of Paper magazine!
