Sheen will return - at a price
Wildman Charlie Sheen, one of American TV’s highest-paid actors, wants a pay rise.
The troubled star today continued an attack on the hit sitcom Two and a Half Men’s network, CBS, and its producers for shutting it down because of his off-set behavior.
He went on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and NBC’s “Today”, in startling interviews that overshadowed morning-after Oscars coverage.
Sheen boasted about his “epic” partying, said he is fueled by “violent hatred” of his bosses, said he cleaned up from drugs at home at his “Sober Valley Lodge” and said he was “tired of pretending I’m not a total, bitchin’ rock star from Mars.”
NBC interviewer Jeff Rossen appeared taken aback when Sheen said he wanted to be paid $3m (€2.17m) an episode to return to the show. He is already reportedly paid $1.8m an episode.
“You want a raise?” Rossen asked.
Replied Sheen: “Yeah, look what they put me through.”
On ABC, Sheen said to correspondent Andrea Canning that he planned to sue his bosses.
“Wouldn’t you?” he said. “I’ve got a whole family to support and love. People beyond me are relying on that. I’m here to collect. They’re going to lose. They’re going to lose in a courtroom, so I would recommend that they settle out of court.”
While Sheen said last week that it would be impossible to do a ninth season of 'Two and a Half Men' with the show’s creators in charge, he said in the television interviews he was ready to work another season.
He said CBS owes him an apology, “publicly, while licking my feet.”
Sheen, who was hospitalized three times in three months, said that he is bored now with cocaine.
But he said he “exposed people to magic” when they partied with him and that he loved doing drugs.
“What’s not to love?” he said on ABC. “Especially when you see how I party. It was epic. The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards just look like droopy-eyed armless children.”
ABC and Radar Online had Sheen’s blood and urine tested for drugs over the weekend.
The results were “a big win for Charlie Sheen, no question,” said Radar’s Dylan Howard. He said the dual tests revealed Sheen had not had drugs in at least 72 hours.
When Canning asked Sheen whether the people who supplied him with drugs were out of his life, Sheen hesitated.
“That’s nobody’s business,” he said. “I think you know the answer to that.”
