Tom Felton Opens Up About His Alcohol Addiction Struggles In New Memoir

Tom revealed that almost all of his 20s were filled with a “drinking to escape” mentality and he spent a lot of time at dive bars in Los Angeles.

“Drinking becomes a habit at the best of times,” he writes in the book. “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.”

He adds, “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.”

An intervention with his agents, managers, lawyer, and former girlfriend Jade Olivia staged an intervention for him.

“Everybody in the room had written me a letter,” he recalled. “I listened to Jade and the others as they told me how concerned they were about my behavior, about my drinking and my substance abuse. I was in no state to hear them.”

Tom admits that the letter from his lawyer, who he barely knew, cut the hardest, and was the decider for him to enter a rehab facility in Malibu. The stay didn’t last long, as less than 24 hours after checking in, he was busting out.

“All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me,” Tom continues. “I was, I realize 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.”

Some time later, Tom entered another rehab facility, but was kicked out after being found in a woman’s room. Another stint in rehab helped him get back on track.

“I am not alone in having these feelings,” he shared. “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. And part of the reason that I took the decision to write these pages is the hope that by sharing my experiences, I might be able to help someone else who is struggling.”

Tom says that he’s “no longer shy of putting my hands up and saying: I’m not okay. To this day I never know which version of myself I’m going to wake up to. Which takes us back to the concept of rehab, and the stigma attached to the word. 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?”

Tom isn’t the only Harry Potter star to open up about their alcohol addiction. So did this one…

If you missed it, another one of Tom‘s Harry Potter co-stars wrote the foreword to the memoir.