Jon Cryer had an extensive career before starring in CBS sitcom hit Two And A Half Men with Charlie Sheen, and he’s had a pretty good career since then. (Notably having a lot of hammy fun as the Lex Luthor of the now-defunct Arrowverse.) But he’s now once again picking up attention, not for his own life, but for the ways it’s been pulled into Sheen’s undeniable orbit over the years. That’s courtesy of a new Netflix documentary about his old co-star, aka Charlie Sheen, which Cryer ended up sitting down for an interview for (after a number of stated reservations), and which saw him compare his old colleague to no less weird a figure than former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il.
Cryer specifically deployed this geopolitical nightmare metaphor while talking about Sheen’s contract negotiations as Two And A Half Men (and his various crises) went on, which ultimately saw Sheen take home roughly three times what Cryer was making on the series. “The dictator of North Korea was a guy named Kim Jong-Il,” Cryer notes in the doc (per Variety). “He acted crazy all the time and thus got enormous amounts of aid from countries who were so scared of him that they would shovel money at him. Well, that’s what happened here. [Sheen’s] negotiations went off the charts because his life was falling apart. Me, whose life was pretty good at that time, I got a third of that.” (For what it’s worth, this is not the first time Cryer has compared Sheen’s tactics to North Korean appeasement strategy; in an interview with us last year, he compared Sheen to Kim Jong-un, instead.)
Cryer points out that Sheen (who was “in the midst of falling apart in every way that I can imagine”) had CBS at least partially over a barrel because the show had been pre-renewed for multiple seasons before Sheen’s struggles with addiction kicked back up. (Sheen ultimately left the series before a final season, which brought in Ashton Kutcher to replace him; the show’s final episode remains a weird meta commentary on the whole situation, with the characters worried “Charlie” is coming back to kill them, and creator Chuck Lorre dropping a piano on a Sheen stand-in to end the show as a whole.)
Cryer—who also wrote a lot about Sheen in his 2015 memoir—is apparently gun-shy enough about the whole thing these days that he really debated even sitting down for the aka Charlie Sheen interview. “If you wonder what it’s like to work with Charlie Sheen for eight years,” he jokes in the just-released doc, “When I started, I had hair. I had some trepidation about participating in this, partially because part of the cycle of Charlie Sheen’s life has been that he messes up terribly, he hits rock bottom, and then he gets things going again. And he brings a lot of positivity in his life, and that’s when he burns himself out again. He just can’t help but set that house on fire, and I didn’t want to be a part of that cycle. I’m not here to build him up and I’m not here to tear him down. But I sure hope this doesn’t go bad.”
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