“Bill & Ted” star Alex Winter would not have been OK if he had not escaped the pitfalls of show business.
During an interview with The Guardian, Winter — who currently stars on Broadway with his “Bill & Ted” costar Keanu Reeves in “Waiting for Gadot” — opened up about the downfalls of finding success at an early age, and explained how years of sexual abuse and trauma pushed him to leave Hollywood and start a new life.
For most of his teenage years, Winter — who made his Broadway debut at 12 years old — worked tirelessly both onstage and off. In 1987, he landed his breakthrough memorable role as Marko in the vampire film “The Lost Boys,” and two years later, played Bill S. Preston in the comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
He moved to Los Angeles a year short of graduating from NYU film school and began shifting his focus to behind-the-scenes work – including directing music videos and commercials – and co-writing various TV hits.
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By 26 years old, however, he was “fried,” and needed an escape.
“I just wanted to get the hell out of the public eye, and just be on the tube, going to my office in Soho and start a family,” said Winter, who shifted his focus to directing and filming documentaries.
“My career is where I want it, which is that I have the ability to do whatever interests me the most,” he added. “But I would not have been OK had I not split.”
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In 2018, Winter opened up about being sexually abused by an unnamed adult who, he said, has since died.
Three years into his career as a teenager, Winter was sharing a Broadway stage with Yul Brynner in “The King and I,” but was “dealing with really intense and prolonged abuse,” he told The Guardian in 2020.
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“There was ‘The King and I’ – eight shows a week, happy face – feeling genuinely happy in that role. Great relationship with my mom and dad; great relationship with the co-workers around me; doing interviews, signing autographs, living this amazing … and then this nightmarish other existence,” he said at the time.
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“I had extreme PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] for many, many years, and that will wreak havoc on you. It’s a way in which you relate to the world around you and to yourself, and it’s very nuanced, but you can become very fractured. So you slowly compartmentalize. You keep this thing over here, you keep that thing over there, and you don’t have any natural equilibrium. That fracturing just gets worse and worse and worse.”
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“By your mid-20s, it’s like you’re holding those different selves together with duct tape. That’s when you see kids overdosing or blowing their heads off. In my case, I was just like, I need to stop doing this thing where these eyes are on me all the time and I don’t feel safe or comfortable … I just want to go ride the subway and help raise a family and do my writing and directing.”
Winter previously said children will undoubtedly face “psychological repercussions” if put into high-pressured situations within Hollywood.
“Statistically, putting a child into a high-pressure, adultified environment, there are going to be psychological repercussions and family dynamic repercussions for all of the members of the family involved in that experience, not just the kid,” he said in 2020.
“It’s unavoidable. If you put your kid in the business or you allow your kid to enter the business, you have to understand that there will 100% be consequences. Those could be incredibly severe; they could be fatal; they could be minor. But absolutely there will be consequences.”
