A decade after Two and a Half Men concluded, Jon Cryer has some choice words about his onscreen brother Charlie Sheen.
The 2x Emmy winner recently compared his former co-star to a dictator, recalling that he was paid “a third” of what Sheen made for their CBS sitcom, which ran for 12 seasons from 2003 to 2015.
“He’s in the midst of falling apart in every way that I can imagine, and he’s renegotiating his contract for another year of a show that I’m supposed to be on too,” he explained in the Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen.
“The dictator of North Korea was a guy named Kim Jong-Il. He acted crazy all the time and thus got enormous amounts of aid from countries who were so scared of him that they would shovel money at him,” added Cryer. “Well, that’s what happened here. [Sheen’s] negotiations went off the charts because his life was falling apart. Me, whose life was pretty good at that time, I got a third of that.”
Cryer noted that CBS “pre-sold a couple extra seasons of the show,” which motivated them to “spend this astonishing amount of money on Charlie.”
Two and a Half Men
Warner Bros. 2023
In Two and a Half Men, hedonistic jingle writer Charlie Harper’s (Sheen) life is thrown for a loop when his recently divorced brother Alan (Cryer) moves into the bachelor’s beachfront house with his son Jake (Angus T. Jones). Following Charlie’s death on the show, billionaire Walden Schmidt (Ashton Kutcher) bought the house and filled out the trio.
Amid his addiction battle, Sheen was fired from the show in 2011 after taking public swipes at CBS, Warner Bros. and series co-creator Chuck Lorre. Season 8 was cut short amid the ordeal, and Kutcher replaced Sheen for the remainder of the series.