Funny thing to write, ‘addiction hiatus.’ But when talking about actor Wes Bentley, who was so captivating as Chris Cooper’s son in the still-outstanding American Beauty and who is now so open about his descent into post-fame alcohol and drug dependancy, there really is no other way to describe it: he took a hiatus.
Bentley recently opened up to Patrick Healy of the New York Times as he launches into an Off Broadway play, Venus In Fur. Publicly opening up about addiction and the resulting career struggles is a courageous move, and one that is becoming increasingly common, as witnessed by the success of Dr. Drew’s two-headed television monster, Celebrity Rehab/Sex Rehab, as well as the original cable addiction phenomenon, A&E’s Intervention.
Bentley was interviewed a few weeks before his Times’ sitdown by TheaterMania. In this interview, Bentley answers the questions surrounding his seclusion following American Beauty by saying, in regards to the roles he was offered:
“I’m not trying to be self-depracating about where I was then – I think I could have done a lot of those roles well enough, but I didn’t want to do them just well enough and I didn’t want to be a marketing tool. It was between me and Tobey Maguire for Spider-Man and it just didn’t feel right for me. The Four Feathers, which I did, felt more right.”
Not to nitpick, but Spider-Man “didn’t feel right”? Talk about a $50-million dollar addiction.
As well, Bentley is a key figure in the documentary film My Big Break, a film from Tony Zierra which first started filming in 1996 and tracked the lives of actors who were roommates with Zierra: Bentley, Chad Lindberg, Brad Rowe, and Greg Fawcett.
Bentley also comes from a religious family: both his parents are United Methodist ministers, and his brother was a youth minister in Kansas. But he ‘abandoned’ spirituality in his youth, and Healy does not dig any deeper as to what effect this may have had on his addictions. His IMDB profile notes that, following American Beauty, he was offered prominent roles in Monster’s Ball, Queen of the Damned, and Pearl Harbor, but ended up being cast in none of those films.
Choice clips:
The remarkable ‘plastic bag’ scene from American Beauty.
Trailer for My Big Break:
A preview of his work on the stage in Venus In Fur:
Filed under: Film Tagged: | American Beauty, New York Times, Patrick Healy, Wes Bentley
It’s great that Mr Bentley is so open about addiction issues and is dealing with them. Hopefully he chooses to do some more acting roles in movies, he was so fantastic in American Beauty, he’s one of those actors who makes it easy to forget you’re watching an actor in a movie and to just see the character and the story.
Great documentary. The guy had it all. Check it out on Netflix or Amazon. MyBigBreakmovie