Following a hiatus of almost seven years, American actress and sweetheart, Amanda Bynes has made a comeback by appearing on the cover of Paper magazine looking happy and healthy, Gulf News reported.
Bynes broke through on Nickelodeon’s sketch comedy show All That before scoring a series of her own at age 13 with The Amanda Show. Her star continued to rise through the early 2000s with movie roles aplenty, including What a Girl Wants, She’s the Man and Hairspray.
However, in her interview with the magazine, Bynes shared that self-image issues fuelled her burgeoning drug habit and led to her abandoning acting altogether.
Bynes pinpoints her role in She’s the Man, in which she plays a girl pretending to be her twin brother, as one of the moments when her body image issues became a problem.
“When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy,” she said.
Bynes added that the short hair and sideburns she had for the role was a “a super strange and out-of-body experience. It just really put me into a funk.”
As a result, she started experimenting with drugs like ecstasy and cocaine, and her goal of losing weight led to an Adderall addiction.
“I definitely abused Adderall,” she said, after “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.’ ”
The actress also recounted a moment on the set of Hall Pass, when, after seeing herself on a monitor, “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.’”
According to Bynes, it was a combination of image issues and Adderall abuse that resulted in her eventually leaving Hall Pass. Shortly thereafter, she found herself in a similar situation while watching her performance in Easy A.
“I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie, and I didn’t like my performance,” she said. “I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.”
Bynes is clear that any bad behaviour in previous years was spurred by drug use and not by psychological issues, saying that once she quit acting, her days were filled with little beyond getting high and self-destructing online. She was also arrested multiple times for drug possession, a DUI and reckless driving.
“I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time, but if I could, I would,” Bynes said. “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.
“Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter,” she said.
In the interview, Bynes also discusses her four years of sobriety and educational pursuit at Los Angeles’ Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, as well as her potential return to acting.