John Goodman Opens Up About Beating Addiction, Credits Roseanne Barr with Saving His Life
John Goodman has been extremely open about his past struggle with alcohol. At one point, he even wanted to leave the popular show, “Roseanne.”
As the show became more popular, so did he. The sudden loss of privacy became too much to handle.
“What it boils down to is I got complacent and ungrateful. And after nine years, eight years, I wanted to leave the show. I handled it like I did everything else, by sittin’ on a bar stool. And that made it worse,” he told the Today show.
His drinking eventually began affecting his work. He remembers drinking on set and slurring his lines.
“I got so lucky because I still getting hired for things, but the fact is, I was drinking at work,” he admitted.
Roseanne Barr proved to be a true friend to Goodman when she began noticing his drinking habit. She knew that alcoholism wasn’t something to ignore.
She was married to Tom Arnold for four years who also struggled with alcoholism so she knew first hand that someone would need to intervene. “She was scared for me, but she was more confrontational,” Goodman said.
He finally hit a turning point when he spent a weekend drinking with friends. He remembers that Sunday morning well, “I was shaking, I was still drinking, but I was still shaking.”
That’s when he knew what Barr had said was true: he needed help.
In 2007, ten years after the finale of “Roseanne,” Goodman called his wife and was checked into a rehabilitation center.
Goodman recalls, “It was getting to be too much. It was 30 years of a disease that was taking its toll on everyone around me and it had got to the point where, every time I did it, it was becoming more and more debilitating. It was life or death. It was time to stop.”
He’s extremely grateful that Barr expressed her concern when she did. “The last four years were pretty bad, and I was drinking at work and (Barr) was scared for me.”
Now that he’s been sober for 10 years, the reboot of “Roseanne” has given Goodman an opportunity to right wrongs of the past. This time, sober.
“That’s exactly what I did,” Goodman said. “Putting the things that I did to myself right again.”
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