What makes a great actor?  One important skill is the ability to believe the part.  Actors sometimes practice roles for months to make their performance more authentic.  However, what happens when an actor plays a drug addict?  What happens when they go  around trying to convince themselves they have a disease of the brain that can kill them?

Philip Seymour Hoffman: In Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, he plays a drug addict embezzler.  He died of a heroin overdose soon after attending AA.

Robin Williams: In the TV series Crazy Ones, he plays an alcoholic advertising exec. “I’ve been to rehab in wine country.”  Killed himself a day after attending AA.

Corey Monteith: In McCanick he plays a drug addicted street hustler – anything for a $50 fix.  He had recently gotten out of rehab at Betty Ford and killed himself after attending an AA meeting.

River Phoenix: Drug addicted hustler in My Own Private Idaho.  Died of “acute multiple drug intoxication” including heroin and cocaine in 1993.

Heath Ledger: Played a heroin addict in Candy.  Died from a mix of drugs while playing the Joker in Batman.

Actors more than anyone have the ability to magnify a small craving into a monumental obsession.  They are especially vulnerable during rough patches in their life, if they feel angry or upset about something.  And then they start taking drugs and feel the need to overdo it.  It’s like watching yourself in a movie.  You are powerless to intervene.

Most of us experience setbacks, frustrations, and humiliations.  But we don’t think we’re powerless so we survive.

Odds are that a great actor playing a drug addict doesn’t have much time left.  Especially if they’ve been to AA/12 Steps ‘treatment’, as many of these actors had just before they self-destructed.

Read more:

• Alcoholism: The Lie Becomes the Truth
• SAMHSA’s New Blood Drive
• The Origin of Sin – We once lived in the Garden
• AA’s Satanic Roots – Have a drink and do what thou wilt
• Lie Like the Wind – How to know if AA is right for you
• How to Drink Like a Normal Man – Just keep it simple
• Powerlessness as Religion – Only the good die young
• You Are So Brainwashed It’s Funny – Who will pay for their sins?
• The Problem of the Jews: a Lesson in Brainwashing Propaganda – How AA bamboozled a country
• The Drinking Club – Watch what they do, not what they say
• Does Addiction Take Away Free Will? – We lived in the Garden
• Cory Monteith: The Cult of Powerlessness Claims Another Victim
• I Call Blackout – I did what??
• Rat Addicts and the Science Of Addiction – The best of 60′s Science Fiction
• A Conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky – 13% and proud
• School for Scoundrels – What you actually learn in the rooms
• AA is a Pagan Cult – Putting the ‘pagan’ in propaganda
• The Little Psychopath Could: How the Addiction Myth creates new Drug Addicts

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