juvenile delinquent in a police station. Also in 1986, he had his breakthrough role in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War drama Platoon, for which the actor received widespread critical acclaim, as the film itself won four Oscars including the Academy Award for Best Picture. The next year he teamed up with Oliver Stone again to star in the box-office smash Wall Street with both Michael Douglas and his father.
Many high-profile movies followed such as No Man’s Land, Eight Men Out, Young Guns, Major League, and The Three Musketeers. Charlie Sheen’s high-profile career, as well as his controversial private life, cannot be covered in full in this article as the focus is to address his life as a person who stutters.
Charlie Sheen’s career took a major pivot in 2000 when he shifted to television taking over the starring role in the show Spin City for that show’s fifth and sixth seasons when star Michael J. Fox had to leave the show due to failing health. In his starring role as New York City Deputy Mayor Charlie Crawford, he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Lead Actor in a Television Series – Comedy or Musical in 2002. Following Spin City, Sheen signed on to the cast of the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, on which he played Charlie Harper from 2003-2011. In his final years on the show, Sheen was the highest paid actor on television, pulling in $2 million per episode.
Sheen’s stuttering was brought to the forefront in a June 21, 2012, Rolling Stone in-depth article titled “Still Crazy After All These Years”, in which the actor described how his stuttering began around the same time as a run-in with a couple of schoolyard bullies. “I was in second or third grade and Emilio was in sixth grade and we were waiting to be picked up. And these two kids were just awful, awful kids, so mean and violent. They didn’t do anything to us. But the stuff they described they were going to do to was even worse. ‘We’re going to toss you over the fence and watch your brains splatter. We’re going to poke your eyes out.’ Just horrible stuff to say to a seven- year-old. I remember thinking, “We’re going to die. These guys are going to kill us.”
Sheen claims that as a result he started having panic attacks, and then one day found himself stuttering. “It was awful. Picture this: In school, they call on you, and out of nowhere – I just stopped answering. I knew all the answers, but I stopped raising my hand. I got real quiet for the longest time.”
Furthermore, an April 9, 2015, article “Charlie Sheen’s Grammar Anxiety” in the Daily Telegraph stated that Two and a Half Men co-star Jon Cryer’s memoir cited that Sheen became the most nervous when they had to do table-reads of a script because of his stutter.
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