Secrets The Cast Of 'Two And A Half Men' Didn't Want Coming Out

"Two and a Half Men" was a massive hit for CBS from the moment it premiered in 2003. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, throughout the show's first eight seasons, viewership oscillated around an impressive 15 million per episode and even hit 24 million at one point during the second season. What's more, it was the most-watched comedy on TV from 2004 through 2011, per The Independent. Following star Charlie Sheen's contentious exit from the show at the end of its eighth season, the series dropped down to 8-10 million weekly viewers, per The State-Journal Register, before finishing strong with 13.2 million folks tuning in to see the 2015 series finale, per The Wrap.

Clearly, show creator Chuck Lorre struck gold with the comedy, as it ran for an impressive 12 seasons, but everything was far from golden behind the scenes. From Sheen's changing relationship with co-star Jon Cryer to Angus T. Jones growing up to hate the show and Sheen and Lorre viciously feuding, the series was marred by controversy. Producers did their best to cover up the dirty laundry, but the truth always comes out and in this case, it reads like a telenovela. These are the wild secrets the cast of "Two and a Half Men" didn't want coming out.

Charlie Sheen's stint on "Two and a Half Men" ended dramatically in March 2011 when he was suddenly fired following increasingly bizarre (and worrying) behavior. You'll likely remember the actor's "tiger blood" phase which made him a tabloid sensation and alienated him from his peers. Well, it wasn't always like that. As co-star Jon Cryer told ET in 2022, when they first signed up for the series, Sheen was two years sober and on his A-game. His comedic timing was impeccable and, as Cryer recalled, "We got along great."

However, things started to change following his 2005 divorce from Denise Richards. First, it was the little things. "He started to have issues with the writing," Cryer said. Things got progressively worse from there as Sheen fell off the wagon and by 2010, his co-stars feared he was near rock bottom. "Charlie didn't look so good as we started our eighth season," Cryer wrote in his 2015 memoir. "Gaunt, pale, sallow, even sweaty occasionally." He was sickly thin and exhibiting a "manic energy." 

As Cryer wrote, "His timing started to go off, too." Slowly, he began forgetting his lines and even his physicality failed him. Cryer recalled a time when Sheen had to hold onto a couch to stay upright during rehearsal. The comedian's colleagues felt helpless as they looked on and eventually, Cryer and show creator Chuck Lorre considered pulling the plug. "We said, 'It's not worth this show going on if going on enables Charlie Sheen to kill himself,'" Cryer told ET.

Charlie Sheen may have a long-running reputation as a womanizer, but back in 2002, he appeared ready to settle down as he tied the knot with Denise Richards. The couple welcomed daughter Sami in 2004 and got pregnant with daughter Lola later that same year, but it was all over in 2005. Despite being six months pregnant, Richards filed for divorce, later telling the "Divorced not Dead" podcast she couldn't handle his antics anymore. "The behind-the-scenes stuff was way worse than what was out there," she shared. While it was a difficult decision, it came down to her kids. As Richards explained, she wondered, "Would I want my daughters to be married to this man?" and the answer was no.

Jon Cryer actually offered a glimpse into their dysfunctional marriage in his "So That Happened" memoir. While filming the show's first season, Sheen had only been married for a year. One day, while on the "Two and a Half Men" set, Sheen showed up at his trailer, holding a shopping bag and frantically asking for help. "He seemed panicked," Cryer recalled. "'Denise is coming over,' he said, 'and I need you to hide something for me.'" Cryer feared there were drugs involved, but "it was a bag filled to the brim with porn." His biggest shock, though, was that his co-star's home life seemed picture-perfect, but clearly wasn't.

Around the same time that Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards split, Jon Cryer also became a single man. He had been married to Sarah Trigger since 1999, but the couple divorced in 2004. It was a contentious split in which Cryer received nearly sole custody of their son, Charlie Austin, and was left feeling broken. "I was an emotional basket case," he wrote in his memoir.

While filming the second season of "Two and a Half Men," both of its leading stars were bachelors and soon, Sheen started sharing details – and photos – of his sexual conquests with Cryer. "He'd show me a picture he'd taken of somebody's vagina," Cryer revealed in his book. "I would invariably think, 'Why just this, and not the rest of the person?'" He himself wasn't ready to date, so when Sheen mentioned paying for sex, he thought it was the perfect option. "Charlie suggested a few online purveyors he occasionally used," he recalled. "He and I had different tastes, so I didn't go with his exact recommendations." However, he wasn't a natural like Sheen. "My forays into prostitution were about as awkward as you might imagine," Cryer shared. Indeed, he once spent 25 minutes talking about the stock market with a match.

Back in January 2011, "Two and a Half Men" went on hiatus while Charlie Sheen sought help in rehab. By February, he claimed he was sober and told "The Dan Patrick Show" (via EW) that he was ready to get back to work but that those in charge refused to restart production. "We are on forced hiatus," he claimed, boasting, "Check it, it's like I heal really quickly." At the same time, Lorre decided to poke fun at Sheen by using the vanity card at the end of that week's "Two and a Half Men" episode to proclaim (via Vulture), "If Charlie Sheen outlives me, I'm gonna be really pissed."

Things quickly deteriorated, as the actor unleashed a number of tirades against his then-boss whom he started calling Haim Levine. First, he told "The Alex Jones Show" (via TMZ) that Lorre simply couldn't handle how quickly he finished rehab. "I've spent, I think, close to the last decade, I don't know, effortlessly and magically converting your tin can into pure gold," he slammed. "And the gratitude I get is this charlatan chose not to do his job, which is to write." He then told TMZ, "I violently hate Haim Levine" and challenged Lorre to a fight before raging, "He's a stupid, stupid little man and a p***y punk that I'd never want to be like."

Initially, CBS and Warner Bros. Television paused production for the rest of the season but come March, they outright fired Sheen.

Angus T. Jones had a Charlie Sheen-esque meltdown of his own in November 2012. The then-19-year-old joined Christopher Hudson, the founder and leader of a Seventh-day Adventist Church called the Forerunner Chronicles, for an interview. The video, which was posted to YouTube, quickly went viral. After explaining how he discovered his newfound faith, Jones proclaimed he no longer wanted to be on "Two and a Half Men" and urged everyone to stop watching the show. "Please stop watching it," he pleaded. "Please stop filling your head with filth." Saying the show went against Christian values, he doubled down on his cry to boycott it. "Do some research on the effects of television in your brain and I promise you, you'll have a decision to make when it comes to television," he claimed. "It's bad news."

The following day, the actor backtracked slightly, saying, per The Hollywood Reporter, "I apologize if my remarks reflect me showing indifference to and disrespect of my colleagues and a lack of appreciation of the extraordinary opportunity of which I have been blessed." In 2014, Jones told KHOU-TV (via The Washington Post) that his feelings towards "Two and a Half Men" hadn't softened. "It was making light of topics in our world that are really problems for a lot of people," he slammed. "I was a paid hypocrite because I wasn't okay with it, but I was still doing it."

In an effort to replace Charlie Sheen with an equally bankable star, "Two and A Half Men" producers set their sights on Hugh Grant. Deadline confirmed in May 2011 that the British actor had attended two in-person meetings and that he seemed interested in the role, but ultimately, the deal fell through. "It was not the money," a source explained. Indeed, Grant was offered a reported $1 million per episode. Rather, the insider noted that it came down to schedule. "He didn't want to do TV because those 24 episodes are a grind and a lot of work," they said.

That may very well have been one of the reasons, but Grant himself told "The Howard Stern Show" in 2016 that the main catalyst for him turning down the opportunity was fear. "They talked to me about it, but the problem was, they didn't have a script or a new character," he recalled. "They just said, 'Trust us. We'll create one.'" Although he respected the team and enjoyed watching the show, he simply couldn't be swayed. "I said, 'I'm too scared to sign up without a script,'" Grant recalled. Asked if he regretted his decision after watching Ashton Kutcher take over, he shared, "What they created for [him] was clearly something completely different from what they would have created for me, so it's hard to judge."

While big money wasn't enough to sway Hugh Grant to take over from Charlie Sheen in the ninth season of "Two and a Half Men," it sure did the trick for Ashton Kutcher. The "That '70s Show" alum signed on to play Walden Schmidt for four seasons and, as he told Howard Stern in 2017, cash had a lot to do with it. "I was shocked I took the role," he admitted, noting he had no interest in doing TV because he wanted to focus on movies. However, he also knew that producers were desperate because they needed to be on the air for two more years in order to be eligible for syndication. "There was a giant motivation to keep the show going because there was a big payday that was gonna come," he mused. That's when he jokingly told his agent that if he were offered the type of extravagant pay Sheen had ($1.2 million per episode, according to The Hollywood Reporter), he'd take the role.

Well, that's exactly what happened. Kutcher was finishing with his dad when he got an unexpected call, offering him the role and a reported $755,000 per episode. He took it, although he too had some fears. Namely, he worried about blowback from Sheen, as well as from viewers. "There's a lot of people that were huge fans of the show with him that did not like me on the show," Kutcher told Stern. "I get it, because it's not the same show."

When "Two and a Half Men" officially ended in February 2015, Chuck Lorre used the final episode's vanity card, per EW, to reveal that Charlie Sheen had been offered a cameo, but he turned it down. "Our idea was to have him walk up to the front door in the last scene, ring the doorbell, then turn, look directly into the camera, and go off on a maniacal rant about the dangers of drug abuse," Lorre wrote. The script then reportedly called for Sheen to tell viewers that he didn't need to heed his own advice because he was "a ninja warrior from Mars" who could survive anything. 

To conclude, a piano would fall on him – which actually did happen in the finale, except Lorre used a Sheen body double who had his back turned to the camera the whole time. "We thought it was funny. He didn't," Lorre concluded before claiming that Sheen wanted a potential cameo to set him up for a spinoff with Jon Cryer called "The Harpers."

In a since-deleted interview with TMZ, Sheen said he was indifferent about the finale, and Lorre. "I don't care if he lives or dies," he slammed, per The Hollywood Reporter. "To go that long with that immature, and that completely unevolved and that stupid, in my face, really?" The actor then concluded his tirade with a threat, boasting, "You must feel safe where you live."