What the hell is Amanda Bynes up to nowadays? It’s a question that all millennials have asked at one point or another over the past eight years (give or take) since the actress’ bizarre departure from the spotlight.
Bynes, who hasn’t appeared in a film since 2010’s Easy A, has emerged from what she’s described as a “really dark, sad world” like a phoenix from the ashes via the latest issue of Paper magazine.
In the issue, the 32-year-old gives a tell-all where she spills tea on her time in the spotlight and reveals what the hell went on back there.
Let’s take a look at this piece-by-piece, shall we?
SHE’S THE MAN / HAIRSPRAY
Perhaps one of Bynes’ most iconic roles was the 2006 Channing Tatum flick She’s The Man where she plays a girl who dresses as a dude in order to earn a spot on a soccer team.
The beloved flick was Channing’s big break and Bynes credits herself with scoring the actor the sick gig of her friend and eventual love interest.
“I totally fought for Channing [to get cast in] that movie because he wasn’t famous yet,” she maintains. “He’d just done a Mountain Dew commercial and I was like, ‘This guy’s a star — every girl will love him!’ But [the producers] were like, ‘He’s so much older than all of you!’ And I was like, ‘It doesn’t matter! Trust me!’”
While she looks back on this aspect of the film fondly, she admits that seeing herself as a man sent her into a “deep depression”.
“When the movie came out and I saw it,” she says, “I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy.”
“I’ve never told anyone that,” she admits, adding that seeing herself with short hair and sideburns was “a super strange and out-of-body experience. It just really put me into a funk.”
Her shitty experience with She’s The Man was remedied by her next flick, the film adaptation of the musical Hairspray.
“That movie to this day was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had on a set,” she says of working with the star-studded cast including Zac Efron, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brittany Snow and John Travolta.
DRUG ABUSE
Despite the fact that Bynes “never really liked going out that much” and “never liked the taste of alcohol”, she admits that smoking marijuana from the age of 16 was the gateway to her heavier drug use which definitely impacted her career and state of mind from that point forward.
“Later on it progressed to doing molly and ecstasy,” she says. “[I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice.”
Around the time of Hairspray, she remembers “reading an article in a magazine that [called Adderall] ‘the new skinny pill’ and they were talking about how women were taking it to stay thin. I was like, ‘Well, I have to get my hands on that.’”
Bynes says she was able to get a prescription after going “to a psychiatrist and faking the symptoms of ADD”, revealing that she “definitely abused Adderall.”
As she became addicted to the prescription drug, Bynes says her behaviour as well as her work ethic started to change which largely played a part in her walking away from the 2010 movie Hall Pass.
“When I was doing Hall Pass, I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [more] high [that way],” she says. “I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines or memorise them for that matter.”
While filming, Bynes says she “remembers seeing my image on the screen and literally tripping out and thinking my arm looked so fat because it was in the foreground or whatever and I remember rushing off set and thinking, Oh my god, I look so bad.”
It was “the mixture of being so high that I couldn’t remember my lines and not liking my appearance” that made Bynes walk away from the film, despite reports at the time which claimed that she’d been fired.
“I made a bunch of mistakes but I wasn’t fired. I did leave… it was definitely completely unprofessional of me to walk off and leave them stranded when they’d spent so much money on a set and crew and camera equipment and everything.”
EASY A
A couple of months went by and Bynes recalls going to a screening of what would ultimately become her last flick for a long time, Easy A and “having a different reaction than everyone else to the movie.”
“I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance,” she says. “I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.”
She continues, “I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me. I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things.”
The popular Emma Stone flick was basically Bynes’ last straw and she took a step back from the spotlight shortly after.
“I saw it and I was convinced that I should never be on camera again and I officially retired on Twitter, which was, you know, also stupid,” she says. “If I was going to retire [the right way], I should’ve done it in a press statement — but I did it on Twitter. Real classy! But, you know, I was high and I was like, ‘You know what? I am so over this’ so I just did it. But it was really foolish and I see that now. I was young and stupid.”
LEAVING THE SPOTLIGHT
Having been acting since a young age, Bynes admits that stepping away meant she “had no purpose in life.”
“I’d been working my whole life and [now] I was doing nothing,” she says. “I had a lot of time on my hands and I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long.”
Bynes said she started “hanging out with a seedier crowd and I isolated a lot… I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me.”
This is around the time that the actress starting attacking fellow celebs on Twitter which she blames on the fact that she “was just stuck at home, getting high, watching TV and tweeting.”
She feels remorseful for that time and the tweets she fired off which had people genuinely concerned for the once great actress.
“I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said,” she admits. “I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would. And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me. It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad,” Bynes says. “Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter.” But, she adds, “it’s definitely not Twitter’s fault — it’s my own fault.”
RETURN
Now, Bynes is almost four years sober (all thanks to her folks) and completing her Associate’s of Art degree in Merchandise Product Development at Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising before embarking on a Bachelor’s degree in January.
She one day hopes to design her own line of clothing but until then wants “to get back into acting first” by re-entering the business “kind of the same way I did as a kid, which is with excitement and hope for the best.” She says she wants to have the chance to “try it all” and “doesn’t want to limit myself” by being pigeon-holed into a specific type of role.
“I have no fear of the future,” she concludes. “I’ve been through the worst and came out the other end and survived it so I just feel like it’s only up from here.”
@HOLLYWOOD, cast the woman in something spectacular pls. She ready.
