Charlie Sheen was anxious before his first conversation in 12 years with former enemy Chuck Lorre about the two reuniting for “Bookie,” Lorre’s new Max series.
“The anxiety that I had prior to our first chat was a tsunami,” Sheen, 58, told The Post in an exclusive interview. “Chuck got on the phone and couldn’t have been more lovely or engaging. It was so healing … and it was so surreal when the little voice in your head keeps saying, ‘This can’t be happening.’
“It was like a really fun dream you’re having,” he said. “It was just so refreshing and liberating. I felt like so much weight had been lifted. It was hard for me to reach out [to Chuck] just because of the amount of shame I’ve lived under for all these years.”
Sheen added, “I told Chuck, ‘You know, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t have a moment of regret about the whole episode,’ and he said, ‘It’s time to move past all that.’”
“It’s easy to forget that we worked together for eight-and-a-half years and made 170 episodes of television and had a lot of fun, more often than not,” Lorre, 71, told The Post. “It was time to put all that craziness behind us.”
Sheen was starring in “Two and a Half Men,” Lorre’s top-rated CBS sitcom, when, in 2011, he plunged into a very public meltdown. He was eventually fired from the show and acrimonious words were exchanged between the star and series co-creator (but mostly from Sheen) — creating a seemingly insurmountable rift … until now.
“It was all him,” Sheen said about Lorre reaching out regarding “Bookie.” “Any chance I got, if I did the odd podcast or interview … I would just talk about about [Chuck] in a way hoping it would get back to him and then maybe he caught wind of some of that.
“The people that were around me knew that I had parked that [meltdown] nonsense and retired my stein,” the actor continued. “To be able to finally be able to do things like this, which I wasn’t able to do for so long, is a gift. It’s like when your baby is born and it’s perfectly healthy — it was up there with the birth of a healthy child.
“I’ll get yelled at for saying that, but it’s true.”
“Bookie,” an eight-episode comedy, premieres Nov. 30. Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco stars as Danny, an Los Angeles bookie staving off the threat of legalized gambling; Omar J. Dorsey plays Ray, his sidekick/muscle.
Sheen has a recurring role as a (slightly) fictionalized version of himself who owes Danny around $75,000 in gambling debts and is tracked down staying at a rehab facility in Malibu (there’s a twist and a wrinkle).
“When we were on the set together it was exciting and it was fulfilling,” he said of Lorre. “It was nourishing. We were back in the trenches together, two guys who are pretty good at what they do, in a high-stakes creative environment with a shared goal — to leave the best stuff you can behind.”
Sheen said he had an almost out-of-body experience at the table read for the series.
“The night before I was working on how I was going to deliver some of my dialogue and then it was weird — it was like that read-through in ‘All That Jazz,’ where all the audio drops out. I saw people laughing and then people came up to me afterwards but on the drive home I didn’t remember doing any of that.
“There was just so much adrenaline,” Sheen added. “And then Chuck called me and was like, ‘Wow, you were amazing, you haven’t missed a step.’ You wish people could peek inside at the inferno to what they saw as smooth sailing.”
Sheen said he like’s the self-deprecating aspect of his “Bookie” alter ego.
And there is some chronological symmetry to his reconciliation with Lorre.
“If I can’t make fun of myself I’m missing some of the best humor in my life,” he said. “And I say that proudly, not to diminish anything. And even for the bad s – – t [but] for some of the fun stuff. I like being the internal butt of my own jokes — and I’m drawn to others that exhibit that as well.
“I think we filmed [‘Bookie’] last April, or close to it, and we shot the pilot of ‘Two and a Half Men’ in 2003, so this was 20 years later, almost to the day,” Sheen said. “It’s interesting. People use the word ‘cosmically,’ but it was a cameo a thousand years ago in ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ that changed my life, instantly and forever.
“This is a cameo, essentially,” he said about his “Bookie” work. “And wouldn’t it be cool if that many years later it was a cameo that reignited whatever is supposed to be next?”
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