How Two And A Half Men Changed Charlie Sheen Forever

"Two and a Half Men" debuted on CBS in 2003 with Charlie Sheen in the lead role of Charlie Harper, a party-loving jingle-writer who ends up living with his divorced brother Alan (Jon Cryer). Alan's young son Jake (Angus T. Jones) also lives with them, hence the show's title. Reviews from major critics have always been mixed, but "Two and a Half Men" commanded a solid ratings presence right away. It came at a time when the sitcom was waning in popularity. "We sort of blew the narrative," Cryer told Today a few weeks into the show's second season. "The story was 'The sitcom is dead,' and then, oops, under the radar we're the No. 2 show last summer."

Part of the show's early success can be attributed to Sheen's comedy chops and his undeniable — if somewhat edgy — charm, but it was perhaps also down to the idea of Sheen playing a slightly fictionalized version of himself. Sheen has acknowledged that the show traded on his personal issues, which were well-known to the public at this point. "I said, 'You can do stuff where I play a womanizer, play a bachelor, play a guy whose moral fiber might be a little questionable,'" he told The Associated Press in 2004. "But I said just do it tastefully and don't beat it into the ground. Just do it intelligently."

Charlie Sheen and "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre had a very public falling out in 2011, one that ultimately led to Sheen being fired from the show. When "Two and a Half Men" was at the height of its success, the pair were good friends, and Sheen acknowledged that Lorre's creative genius was the reason the show was such a hit. "We've all just sort of surrendered to Chuck's guiding hand, and we've all been the better for it," Sheen told The Hollywood Reporter in 2007. "I respect the man like crazy, and feel very lucky to have landed here on a show that's been such a stabilizing influence during a very rough time personally."

The show allowed Sheen to get himself into a healthy frame of mind for a period of time. Sadly, this wouldn't last. His falling out with Lorre was due to a relapse that ruined their friendship as well as their hit sitcom. Thankfully, he managed to get sober after being replaced in the lead role by Ashton Kutcher. Sheen and Lorre have since made amends, and Sheen has acknowledged that he was at fault for things going wrong. "There was 55 different ways for me to handle that situation, and I chose number 56," he told Yahoo!. "And so, you know, I think the growth for me post-meltdown or melt forward or melt somewhere — however you want to label it — it has to start with absolute ownership of my role in all of it. It was desperately juvenile."

Being in a hit TV show is a ton of work, and it usually prohibits actors from taking on other roles. While Charlie Sheen appeared in some films during the early seasons of "Two and a Half Men," he began making fewer big screen appearances as the show chugged along. Before "Two and a Half Men," Sheen tended to shoot two to four movies a year. He averaged around a single film appearance a year while the show was being made, and these were mostly cameo roles.

Even though Sheen became arguably a bigger name because of his sitcom success with "Two and a Half Men," the show and the time commitment it involved seemingly killed off his career as a movie star. "A standard sitcom taping can take about four hours," said Frommer's writer Jason Cochran after attending a taping of "Will & Grace," adding, "To this day, the '90s sitcom 'Friends' remains infamous in Hollywood for taking six or seven laborious hours to bang out." At the end of his working week, Sheen likely had little time for other projects.

In "Two and a Half Men," Charlie Harper's finances aren't really explored in that much detail. For the premise of the show to work, the audience simply has to accept that he earns enough money from his gig as a jingle writer to support his playboy lifestyle. Similarly, the amount that Charlie Sheen was paid for the CBS sitcom was never revealed down to the dollar, though various reports about his wage came out over the years, and one thing is clear — he earned a pretty penny.

While it might not match up to the biggest A-listers in Hollywood, being a sitcom star isn't without its perks. If you're a big-name actor, you can take home some serious money, and that was certainly the case when Sheen was leading the line in "Two and a Half Men." It's been said that Sheen was making $800,000 an episode during the early seasons of "Two and a Half Men," and that he was earning a whopping $1.8 million per episode by the end. In 2011, Forbes named Sheen as the highest-paid TV actor in Hollywood.

In the end, the money actually played into the decision to fire Sheen from the show. "I think there was a moment where Chuck Lorre and I were looking at each other and we said, 'It's not worth this show going on if going on enables Charlie Sheen to kill himself,'" Jon Cryer recalled during a 2022 interview with Entertainment Tonight. "If giving him enough money to do whatever the thing is that ends his life, you know, we don't want to be a part of that."

Charlie Sheen's brushes with the law during the latter days of his tenure on "Two and a Half Men" gained a lot of attention, but the actor also made headlines when he aligned himself with conspiracy theorists known as Truthers, people who believe that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job. The movement began in earnest with a 2005 indie documentary called "Loose Change," which argues that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were a false flag operation perpetrated by the George Bush administration. Several revised cuts of the film were released over the coming years, and Charlie Sheen expressed an interest in narrating one of them, per The New York Times.

Sheen was quizzed about his views on the subject in 2017 when he appeared in "9/11," a film about a group of strangers trapped in a World Trade Center elevator during the attacks. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, he said that the project had nothing to do with the conspiracy theories, but he also maintained that "there are still a couple of things just rooted in simple physics that beg some measure of inquiry." He added that he "was in contact with a lot of family members" of victims as he prepared for the project and that "they were in concert with a lot of my questions." However, at the end of the day, the film was simply a way to show people that he could still act, he said. "I saw it as an opportunity to do something dramatic, something I had not done in a long time."

When Charlie Sheen called Chuck Lorre "a stupid, stupid man" and "a little maggot," it seemed like there was no way back for the former friends. They didn't speak for over a decade following the media circus that Sheen's comments created, but it appears as though time really does heal all wounds. In 2023, it was revealed that Sheen would be making some cameo appearances in Lorre's latest comedy series "Bookie," a show about a Los Angeles bookmaker (Sebastian Maniscalco) struggling to stay afloat after the legalization of sports gambling.

It was Lorre who extended the olive branch, reaching out to Sheen's rep to find out if he was interested in appearing as a fictionalized version of himself. "I was nervous, but almost as soon as we started talking, I remembered, we were friends once," Lorre told Variety. "And that friendship just suddenly seemed to be there again. I don't want to be too mawkish about it, but it was healing. And he was also totally game to make fun of himself. When he came to the table read of that episode, I walked up, and we hugged. It was just great."

Thanks to his connection with "Two and a Half Men" and its creator, things are starting to look rosy again for Sheen, who has managed to turn his life around for the sake of his kids. "Next month I'll be six years sober," he told People in December 2023. "I have a very consistent lifestyle now. It's all about single dad stuff, and raising my 14-year-old twin boys Max and Bob. Now I wake up early, around 4:30 or 5AM, get an early jump on the news, work out, [and] answer emails." Now that's what we call winning.