10 Actors and Celebrities Who Quit Drinking Alcohol [Fact Sheet]

Famous actors who got sober and stayed sober

Hollywood and sobriety don’t exactly go hand in hand. Between the wrap parties, press tours, and award show after-parties, alcohol flows freely through the entertainment industry. That’s what makes this list so remarkable — every person on it walked away from drinking at the height of their careers, often under the brightest spotlights imaginable.

Some quit after decades of heavy use. Others hit rock bottom so hard they nearly didn’t survive. A few simply decided it wasn’t serving them anymore. Whatever the reason, these actors and celebrities prove that giving up alcohol doesn’t mean giving up success — in many cases, it’s the very thing that made their biggest achievements possible.

Anthony Hopkins

Net worth: 120 million USD

Sir Anthony Hopkins has been sober since December 29, 1975 — over fifty years now. That makes him the longest-tenured teetotaler on this list by a wide margin.

The turning point came one night in Beverly Hills when Hopkins was driving in a blackout. He had no idea where he was or where he was going. As he told The Hollywood Reporter, the moment he realized he could have killed someone was the moment everything changed. He called his agent, walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and never drank again.

What’s remarkable is how Hopkins talks about it now. Rather than treating his alcoholism as a burden, he’s called it “a great gift,” telling the Irish Times that recovery fundamentally transformed his life for the better. He credits a sense of what he describes as “divinity” for ending his cravings almost instantly. On his 50th sobriety anniversary, Hopkins posted a simple message on Instagram: “Choose life instead of the opposite. Life life life and more life.”

The man won his second Oscar at age 83 for The Father. Half a century of sobriety clearly hasn’t slowed him down.

Samuel L. Jackson

Net worth: 250 million USD

Here’s a fact that might surprise you: Samuel L. Jackson’s career didn’t really take off until after he got sober. He’d been acting for years, but his breakout role in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever came in 1991 — the same year he checked into rehab.

Jackson’s rock bottom was as dramatic as any scene he’s played on screen. After a bachelor party, he came home with cocaine and attempted to cook it on his stove. He passed out cold. His wife and eight-year-old daughter found him unconscious on the kitchen floor, surrounded by drugs and paraphernalia. The next morning, he checked into the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota, as Men’s Journal reported.

He got sober on the first try and has stayed that way for over thirty years. Jackson still practices what he describes as daily vigilance. “I didn’t drink yesterday and I’m not planning on it today,” he has said. The results speak for themselves — his films have grossed over $27 billion worldwide, making him one of the highest-grossing actors in cinema history.

Robert Downey Jr.

Net worth: 300 million USD

Robert Downey Jr.’s fall and rise might be the most famous comeback story in Hollywood history. His struggles with cocaine and alcohol began shockingly early — his father introduced him to marijuana at age six. By the late 1990s, Downey was cycling through arrests, jail time, and career implosion. In 1999, he was sentenced to 36 months in prison.

The real turning point came in 2003, when his then-girlfriend Susan Levin (now his wife) gave him an ultimatum: get clean or lose her. He chose sobriety. As he told Parade, he maintained his recovery through a combination of 12-step programs, yoga, meditation, therapy, and martial arts training.

The career that followed is almost absurd in its scale. Within five years of getting sober, Downey landed the role of Tony Stark in Iron Man, launching a run that would earn him hundreds of millions and make him the cornerstone of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Forbes named him the highest-paid actor in the world in 2013, 2014, and 2015, and he won an Oscar for Oppenheimer in 2024. None of it would have happened without that ultimatum in 2003.

Bradley Cooper

Net worth: 120 million USD

Bradley Cooper got sober in July 2004, at age 29. At the time, he was a relatively unknown actor with a cocaine and alcohol problem that was wrecking both his personal and professional life.

The wake-up call came from an unlikely source: his friend Will Arnett. At a dinner party, Arnett pulled Cooper aside and told him he was acting like “a real a–hole.” As Cooper recounted to CNN, that blunt conversation was the first time he ever realized he had a problem.

Cooper has been open about the fact that everything in his career happened after he got sober. The Hangover trilogy, Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper, eight Oscar nominations — all of it came post-sobriety. He drew heavily on his personal experience with addiction when directing and starring in A Star Is Born in 2018, telling Variety that his past made it easier to authentically portray a character battling substance abuse on screen.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Net worth: 60 million USD

Jamie Lee Curtis’s addiction story is different from most on this list. She wasn’t a drinker — she was hooked on opiates. After a routine cosmetic procedure in the late 1980s, she was prescribed Vicodin for pain management. That prescription spiraled into a decade-long addiction that she hid from nearly everyone in her life.

Curtis has been remarkably candid about how bad things got. She stole pills from friends and family members. She has said that if fentanyl had been as widely available then as it is today, she would be dead. The turning point came in 1998, when her sister confronted her about the addiction. Shortly after, Curtis read an article in Esquire titled “Vicodin, My Vicodin” and realized she wasn’t alone. On February 3, 1999, she attended her first recovery meeting — the same day she told her husband, filmmaker Christopher Guest, about her addiction, as she explained to Variety.

Curtis has called getting sober her “single greatest accomplishment — bigger than my husband, bigger than both of my children and bigger than any work, success, failure.” She celebrated 27 years of sobriety in February 2026, and won her first Oscar in 2023 for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Brad Pitt

Net worth: 400 million USD

Brad Pitt is one of the more recent entries on this list. He quit drinking in 2017, about a year after a widely reported incident on a private plane involving Angelina Jolie and their children. Jolie filed for divorce shortly after, and Pitt has been candid that the split forced him to reckon with his relationship with alcohol.

“I can’t remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something,” Pitt told GQ Style in 2017. “I enjoyed wine very, very much, but I just ran it to the ground.” He spent 18 months attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — a fact that he later revealed actually got him in trouble with the organization. “You know they came down on me for that?” he said. “AA did. They were like, ‘It’s anonymous.’”

Pitt has described sobriety as getting his “feelings back in his fingertips.” He said he realized that much of his drinking was about running from emotions — using cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana as pacifiers rather than addressing what was actually going on underneath.

Colin Farrell

Net worth: 80 million USD

Colin Farrell entered rehab in 2006 after roughly 18 years of daily drinking that started when he was just 14 years old. By the time he was filming Miami Vice in 2005, he’d reached a breaking point.

The biggest motivation for getting clean wasn’t his career — it was his son James, who was diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, a rare neurological disorder requiring lifelong care. Farrell has said that when he entered rehab for the first time, he “very clearly made James my higher power.” Being a present father became incompatible with his lifestyle, and fatherhood won.

“After 20 years of drinking the way I drank, the sober world is pretty scary,” Farrell told the Irish Times in 2021. He described the early days of sobriety as losing a buffer he’d relied on for his entire adult life. But Farrell also said he gained something invaluable — “eight hours a day that I didn’t have before.” He even voluntarily returned to rehab in 2018, after 12 years of sobriety, as a kind of maintenance check-in. His career has only accelerated since getting clean, with an Emmy-nominated turn in The Penguin and an Oscar-nominated performance in The Banshees of Inisherin.

Drew Barrymore

Net worth: 85 million USD

Drew Barrymore has been navigating her relationship with substances since she was a child — literally. She was in rehab for the first time at age 13, and her early struggles with drugs and alcohol became tabloid staples in the early 1990s.

After years of managing her drinking, Barrymore made a renewed commitment to sobriety around 2019, shortly before landing her daytime talk show. She went public with the decision in 2021, telling CBS that she hadn’t had a drink in two-and-a-half years. “It was something that I realized just did not serve me and my life,” she said. She’d kept it quiet because it was a “quiet, confident journey” she wanted to protect.

Barrymore has been especially honest about the darker side of her drinking. She’s described herself as a “blackout drinker” who put herself in situations she deeply regretted, telling HuffPost that she “felt so much shame” about her behavior. Her daughters became her strongest motivation to stay sober, and she’s called giving up alcohol “one of the most liberating things in my journey of life.”

Tom Hardy

Net worth: 40 million USD

Tom Hardy’s substance abuse started horrifyingly young — he began sniffing glue at age 11 and was deep into alcohol and cocaine addiction by his mid-teens. By the time he was 25, he’d nearly destroyed himself.

The moment that changed everything came when Hardy woke up in a crowded street in Soho, lying in a puddle of his own blood and vomit. A doctor delivered a warning that stuck with him: “You go down that road, Tom, you won’t come back. That’s it. All you need to know.” Hardy got sober in 2003 and has stayed clean for over two decades, as LADbible reported.

In a memorable appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show, Hardy shared a particularly wild anecdote from his addiction years — waking up in a bed in Los Angeles next to a man holding a gun and a cat, neither of which he remembered. He described most of that period of his life as “a blackout.” Today, Hardy channels his energy into martial arts training and serves as an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust, mentoring young people dealing with similar struggles.

Daniel Radcliffe

Net worth: 110 million USD

Being the most famous teenager on the planet will do things to a person. Daniel Radcliffe started drinking heavily as a coping mechanism for the intense scrutiny of being Harry Potter, and by his own admission, he became reliant on alcohol to enjoy anything at all.

“The quickest way to forget about the fact that you’re being watched is to get very drunk,” he told Entertainment Tonight. Radcliffe first quit drinking around 2010, after wrapping the final Harry Potter film, but relapsed in 2012 following an alcohol-fueled altercation at a New York City bar. He has been fully sober since that wake-up call.

As Fortune noted, Radcliffe earned $110 million from the Harry Potter franchise alone. Unlike many child stars who flame out, his post-sobriety career has been marked by deliberate, interesting choices — from stage work on Broadway to offbeat films like Swiss Army Man. He won his first Tony Award in 2024. “When I think of the sort of chaos I used to invite into my life,” he’s said, “I’m really much happier now.”

Sobriety Doesn’t End a Career — It Often Starts the Best Part

If there’s a common thread running through this list, it’s timing. Samuel L. Jackson’s breakout came the same year he got clean. Robert Downey Jr. became Iron Man five years into sobriety. Bradley Cooper’s entire A-list career happened after he quit at 29. Anthony Hopkins won his second Oscar at 83, fifty years sober.

The entertainment industry might be built around champagne toasts and open bars, but the people on this list prove that you don’t need any of it to do your best work. In many cases, walking away from alcohol is what finally made the best work possible.

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