“Harry Potter” star Tom Felton found himself sobbing on a beach in California after fleeing a pricey Malibu rehab — less than 24 hours after checking in.
“All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me,” he writes in his new memoir “Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard,” out Tuesday. “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 anymore.”
The English actor, who played Draco Malfoy in the Potter films, writes how he met “three kings” who helped save him that night.
The first was a gas station attendant who gave him water and $20; the second an Uber driver who drove him to Hollywood; and, finally, a bartender from his regular haunt gave him a place to stay and a shoulder to cry on.
Less than 24 hours before, Felton had bounded into his manager’s office to discuss a film offer — only to discover that he was actually walking into an intervention.
Letters were read, including one from Felton’s actress girlfriend Jade Olivia, but the one that moved him came from “the person in the room who I knew the least.
“My lawyer, whom I’d barely ever met face to face, spoke with quiet honesty,” he writes. “‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I don’t know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I’ve been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don’t be the twelfth.’”
Felton had moved to Hollywood looking for work and quickly became immersed in the heady atmosphere — including free designer clothes and loaned luxury cars.
“My world became one of crazy opportunity, elaborate nights out and — there’s no other way of putting it — cool free shit. I enjoyed it. Jade enjoyed it,” he writes, noting that it’s almost impossible not to be changed by it all.
“For a while, it was lots of fun,” Felton writes. “But only for a while. The gleam soon began to tarnish. I never knew I wanted this kind of life. And as time passed, an uncomfortable truth quietly presented itself to me: I didn’t want it … I was in a lucky and privileged position. But there was something inauthentic about the life I was leading.”
The “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” star says he missed his old life and having an ordinary conversation with “an authentic human who didn’t know who I was and didn’t care. I missed my mum.”
Felton began spending time at Barney’s Beanery, an old-school bar in Hollywood.
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Before that, he had barely touched alcohol and now he was “regularly having a few pints a day before the sun had even gone down, and a shot of whiskey to go with each of them…
“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.”
After Felton skipped out on the Malibu rehab he found a second one which was smaller and not so fancy. But then he got kicked out after being found in a girl’s room.
“On a couple of occasions, the therapists caught me canoodling with [a young woman] round the side of the building when we were pretending to put the bins out. One evening I committed the cardinal sin of sneaking into the girls’ house and into her room,” Felton writes. “I honestly didn’t have anything particularly nefarious in mind. She had been quiet at dinner and I wanted to make sure she was okay.”
Although the actor didn’t finish the program, he continued to volunteer at Venice Beach handing out food. He also struck up a friendship with Greg Cipes, an actor, vegan and activist, crashing at his place on a yoga mat for a couple of months.
“That time truly reprogrammed who I was as a person,” Felton writes.
The actor began to gain control of his life, adopted a dog, and was happy. So it was a complete shock, he writes, when a couple of years later “the numbness returned, without any warning and with no particular trigger.”
The “Feed” star says that he struggled to get out of bed and eventually had to go back to rehab.
“I can honestly say it was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make,” he writes. “But the very fact that I was able to admit to myself that I needed some help — and I was going to do something about it — was an important moment.”
Felton’s book does not mention the 2021 incident in which he collapsed on a golf course during a celebrity tournament. He later blamed it on a severe case of jet lag.
