He was too crazy for Donald Trump, but Clint Eastwood wanted to save him: Charlie Sheen confesses a life full of egomaniacal scandals

Where a normal life goes through its usual ups and downs, Charlie Sheen's resembles a rubber ball bouncing with tremendous force through a stairwell. In unpredictable trajectories, it races up to the ceiling and back down again, bounces against walls, and crashes into steps – but never completely disintegrates into its individual pieces. At most, scratches remain, allowing the next throw to begin.

Around 2010, Sheen was the highest-paid television actor in the world. He earned almost two million dollars for a 21-minute episode of "Two and a Half Men." The sitcom's main character was also named Charlie, a superficial bon vivant and womanizer. All he had to do to be funny was look puzzled, wink, and make an ironic remark about his insecure brother or his new bedmate. Admittedly, the canned laughs helped quite a bit.

Five years later, by which time he'd long since been fired from the series and his character buried, Sheen announced that he'd been infected with HIV for some time. A diagnosis that would have been fatal at the beginning of his career in the mid-1980s. While the infection is still incurable, it's at least treatable for those who can afford it. "The tattoos are much worse," Sheen says in interviews today. Casually, behind a wall of irony, just as he comments on all his escapades with a mixture of brutal honesty and contrite mischievousness. Yeah, fuck, it wasn't that cool. But a little bit, right?

Sheen turned 60 on September 3rd. Last week, two media memorabilia pieces were released: his autobiography, "The Book of Sheen," brimming with profanity. And the two-part Netflix documentary "aka Charlie Sheen," a confessional in a profane setting. Sheen sits at a corner table in a typical American diner, with ketchup and a tube of mustard on the table. Amazingly, the brown leather seats look barely more leathery than Sheen's boyish face. "The best thing about a diner: There are no surprises."

Whether you find everything Sheen has done over the past few decades surprising depends on how closely you've devoted yourself to celebrity news in the gossip columns. There was a time when Sheen could fill them all on his own. With an unfathomable array of alcohol and drug escapades, with call girls and prostitutes, with violent outbursts and bizarre bouts of egomania. A three-pronged life, as Sheen sums up in the documentary: "Partying. Partying with problems. And then just problems."

It all started with cannabis at a young age, then cocaine and crack cocaine intensified the high. And of course, alcohol, the worst drug because it was taken for granted. Sheen took everything, for days on end, completely reckless of his own life and limb – and of others as well. Like in the Ballermann hit: "There's only one gas – full throttle." But no matter how hard he fell, Sheen got back up. His childhood friend Sean Penn, who, like other companions, also speaks in the documentary, speculates about a biological anomaly; Sheen should have been dead long ago.

His first time using crack, he got a blow job. "How can I tell this with—ahem—a bit of style?"—"That train left the station!" shouts director Andrew Renzi from the background. Sheen fires off his anecdotes like a teenager who couldn't care less that his last shred of self-respect is plummeting down the drain. How, thanks to his celebrity bonus, he was able to sit in the pilot's seat of a commercial airliner and briefly fly it—without the passengers' knowledge and while completely drunk, of course. How he had a nosebleed for 18 hours from a cocaine marathon and had to shove an ice cube up his butt to keep from falling asleep from exhaustion.

Like a maelstrom, Sheen pulled people from his environment down and into excess. His dealer, Marco, recounts in the documentary how he had just been released from prison and had renounced crime when Charlie Sheen came around the corner. Naturally, family and friends intervened at first, and at one point, even Clint Eastwood was called in: "Kid, you need to get your life back on track."

But his life remained a wild, indestructible rubber ball. At his third and final wedding (to actress Brooke Mueller), his father simply resignedly said, "I hope you know what you're doing." And in an old recording, we see Donald Trump advising the bride's parents not to let their daughter marry this madman.

Perhaps one becomes so excessive after nearly dying at birth because the umbilical cord got wrapped around one's neck. The doctor saved the life of the third of four siblings, the infant Carlos Irwin Estévez, in a New York hospital in 1965. As a token of gratitude, he was immortalized in his middle name. The path to acting was laid out early on by their father, Martin Sheen, who took the children to the Philippines to film "Apocalypse Now." And by the rivalry with their brother, Emilio Estévez, who, unlike the other two, kept his Hispanic birth name.

Sheen's Hollywood career wasn't born into his blood; in 1983, in a teenage role in "Grizzly 2," he sat around a campfire alongside George Clooney and Laura Dern before the bear came. But the trashy film wasn't released until 2020 after massive production problems. For his six minutes, Sheen gave up the lead role in "The Karate Kid," which catapulted Ralph Macchio to stardom. Three years later, Sheen only needed a few words in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" to get his first iconic scene. Then came cinematic history with the Vietnam War films "Platoon" and "Wall Street," both directed by Oliver Stone.

His role in "Two and a Half Men," arguably the most popular among millennials, was due in no small part to the fact that Sheen needed regular entertainment between all the downfalls. He had already established himself in the comedy genre with the terrific parody "Hot Shots" (1991) and the now largely forgotten series "Spin City"; for the latter, he received the Golden Globe in 2002, the only major award of his career. This may also have something to do with the fact that Charlie Sheen always embodies one role perfectly: Charlie Sheen.

Many were less fascinated by his career as a character actor or clown than by the fact that he broke all the rules that were supposed to be followed out of respect. Sheen was a macho megalomaniac, a product of the hedonistic Brat Pack of the 1980s, who should damn well do whatever he wanted. But even for a riot-tolerant audience, Sheen's erratic antics were too extreme: On his "Torpedoes of Truth" stage tour, which Sheen launched in 2011 as a provocation after his dismissal from "Two and a Half Men," he was booed, slurring his words and chain-smoking.

The documentary unfortunately leaves the violent incidents involving women in particular in the fog of memory. Did Sheen intentionally shoot Kelly Preston, or was it an accident? In the case of the knife attack on Brook Mueller, she herself was so insane that she no longer remembers what happened. Nothing sticks with Sheen; probably also because those around him were often in a similarly deranged state as he was.

Sheen vehemently denies the most serious allegations: that he concealed his illness from partners and that he raped Corey Haim. The final confession at the end: Sheen had sex with men. For some Americans, this might be a revelation worse than a crack pipe.

Today, Sheen says he's been sober for seven years and appears reformed. And Hollywood loves fallen stars who climb back up to heaven. His ex-wife, Denise Richards, who cries constantly in the documentary whenever she thinks back to their marriage, says she still loves Sheen somehow. And the long-neglected children are also happy about their new dad. According to its protagonist, "Aka Charlie Sheen" is also a love letter to his father and brother, Emilio Estevez. Both refused to participate in the documentary.

«Aka Charlie Sheen»: 2 parts of 90 minutes each on Netflix.