‘Yellowstone’ star Wes Bentley says Robert Downey Jr. ‘saved’ him when he was battling heroin addiction, and how he hopes to return the favor by helping him overcome his own addiction
Wes Bentley is currently in rehab. He’s been clean and sober for 17 years. Yet that hasn’t changed the way he sees the world.
As a young child, he was one of the first people to go to the hospital when his mother, Barbara, collapsed. He was there as she died. “I was in the room with her when she died,” he recalled to the Boston Globe, admitting he fell into a deep depression afterward.
That depression lasted for decades. It’s the reason for his famous catchphrase, “I’m fine,” with which he so often greets his audience at the beginning of a movie or TV show. “I’ve suffered this addiction. I don’t think I’ve suffered a worse one in my life,” he writes on The Huffington Post recently, calling it “one of the most painful experiences of my life.”
As soon as he was able, he sought help, and he’s been off of opioids for nearly 17 years. He’s also overcome other addictions related to alcohol, nicotine, and sugar, the latter of which he said led to his most serious addiction to heroin — a drug he describes as a “narcotic for the masses.”
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He was in the hospital for most of his first year of sobriety, suffering from severe depression and physical pain. “I became a walking medical emergency,” he told the Globe.
“I was one of the people who came to the hospital when the patients came in and I watched as the doctors, nurses, the respiratory therapists — all these people were taking care of these patients,” he said. “So I became a member of that hospital staff. But the sad fact of the matter is I became a member of the entire medical staff for 17 years.”
“I couldn’t do any of the normal jobs that I used to do because of my pain and my physical limitations