Charlie Sheen and his former “Two and a Half Men” boss Chuck Lorre have buried the hatched 12 years after having a very public falling out.
The former foes made amends when Lorre, 71, realized that Sheen, 58, would be perfect for a role in a few episodes of his upcoming Max comedy series, “How to Be a Bookie.”
“I was nervous, but almost as soon as we started talking, I remembered, we were friends once,” the director told Variety in an interview published Wednesday. “And that friendship just suddenly seemed to be there again.”
“I don’t want to be too mawkish about it, but it was healing,” Lorre continued. “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.”
The producer admitted that as time passed, he got to a place where his feud with Sheen was “old news.”
“I loved working with Charlie on ‘Two and a Half Men.’ We did 170 episodes together before it all fell apart. And more often than not, we had a good time,” he said. “Assuming he’s in a good place, I’m in a good place.”
Sheen, who refused to comment on their rekindled friendship due to the SAG-AFSTRA strike, had previously gone on several tirades about Lorre that tore the two colleagues apart.
The actor once called Lorre “a stupid, stupid man,” a “little maggot” and even hurled antisemitic slurs at the TV writer.
Sheen then spiraled on what he called “an epic drug run” and conducted several wild interviews, in which he famously coined the terms “winning” and “tiger blood” during that time.
The “Wall Street” star was subsequently fired from the CBS series and replaced by Ashton Kutcher.
Despite all the pain their feud caused, Lorre knew Sheen was the right man for the job on his upcoming project.
The Max series, co-created by Lorre and Nick Bakay, centers around a Los Angeles sports-betting bookie played by comedian Sebastian Maniscalco.
Lorre and Bakay were looking for a real-life Hollywood star to play a version of themselves as a serious gambler in the show.
“It should be Charlie,” Lorre told Variety. “I remember Charlie was very much engaged in sports betting and he would tell me stories about it all the time. You know, when things were good.”
Lorre’s intuition was right and he was blown away by Sheen’s performance during rehearsals.
“He proceeded to kill it at the table read. His chops were just so finely tuned, as if we had not missed a beat,” the “Big Bang Theory” creator said.
“That really falls on Charlie being a really good sport. He’s playing a version of himself that has shadows of past problems and he was fine with it.”
Sheen, who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction before going sober in 2017, had just one concern about the role as himself: that his character was staying at a rehab facility.
“He was kind of like, ‘Can we not do the drug-addled Charlie anymore?’” Lorre recalled, explaining that they decided to change the original script by moving a poker game from a rehab center to a rented-out room to make Sheen more comfortable.
“It’s a rehab that he knows, but he’s not there to dry out from drugs and alcohol — he’s just running a poker game,” Lorre said. “And that solved that. I wasn’t seeking to do damage to the man. I wanted to hopefully take people’s perceptions and make it comedic, not dark.”
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Bakay, 64, acknowledged that Lorre’s decision to collaborate with Sheen was a “thunderbolt,” but that they were both ready to move on and do something “on a more significant level.”
“Look, there’s an exploitive level to it, which is, it’s kind of fantastic for our first episode,” the “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” voice actor admitted of Sheen’s star power.
“But there’s a bigger part of it, and this is what really is my takeaway throughout all of it: Through all the carnage, these guys made beautiful music together. And Charlie’s really good.”
Bakay concluded, “There was that realization of like, ‘Yeah, this is one of the best comedy actors.’ And it was like watching a guy in batting practice grooving balls over the fences again.”
“How to Be a Bookie” premieres on Max on Nov. 30.
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