Josh Peck is opening up about his struggles with addiction during his teenage years. The 36-year-old actor, best known for his role in the popular Nickelodeon series “Drake & Josh,” recently appeared on the “Cancelled with Tana Mongeau” podcast, where he discussed his journey through substance abuse and the pressures of fame.
Peck, who described himself as a “morbidly obese” teen, revealed that he believed losing over 125 pounds would solve all his problems. However, he soon found himself turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with the pressures of fame, family issues, and other inner turmoil. “At 17, I lost all this weight but I was like the same head but in a different body. I thought, ‘I’m at the finish line. I did it. Now I just don’t have to worry about anything,'” Peck recalled.
Despite his weight loss, Peck continued to struggle with the same thoughts and issues that had plagued him his whole life, including “dad issues.” As a former child star, he also felt the need to make up for his lost teenage years while building his showbiz career and working on “Drake & Josh” from 2004 to 2007. “I also was 17 and supremely stupid, and it’s time for me to catch up. I have to party now because I spent my teenage years alphabetizing my DVDs and not going and making out with people. So now it’s time,” he explained.
Peck described his experience with drugs as a “total cliché.” He recalled the first time he tried drugs at 17, saying, “I’m lying in bed that night and I realized what a great time I’d had that night. I felt charming, handsome, and I was having great conversations and talking to girls.” He continued, “I remember thinking, ‘Why would anyone ever want to feel any other way but this?’ And I took that deep breath I’d been seeking my whole life. Suddenly, I felt free.”
Reflecting on that moment nearly 20 years later, Peck recognizes that he had simply traded one addiction (food) for another (drugs and alcohol). “I can look back on that now and go, ‘Oof.’ That was the moment where I said, ‘Oh, this is who I am,’ and that sent me on a four-year vision quest that could have been really bad,” he explained.
Peck succeeded in getting sober in 2008 at age 21 and now feels lucky to have gotten a handle on his addiction before things grew even worse. “To be able to have gotten out of it at 21, I feel grateful. There were a lot of close calls.” He added that his motivation to seek treatment was partly due to feeling like a cliché and breaking his mother’s heart.
Peck wrote about his years-long struggle with addiction in his memoir “Happy People Are Annoying,” released in May 2022. In an interview with PEOPLE at the time, he said he was “always looking for something outside to fix my insides.” He realized that whether his life was beyond his wildest dreams or a total mess, it didn’t change the temperature of what was going on in his mind. “I knew that nothing in the outside world would make me feel whole,” he said.
Experimenting with drugs and alcohol gave Peck an outlet for his emotional pain. “It was really a buffet,” he explained. “I had this illusion of becoming more confident and attractive when I was partaking. I was trying to quiet that voice that woke me up every morning and told me I wasn’t enough.”
Despite the mistakes he made, Peck said that when he looks back at his teenage self, he sees only strength and resilience. “It took me a really long time to love the 15-year-old version of me,” he told PEOPLE. “But now I understand how strong he was. And I feel like everything in my life set me up to find this chapter of health, peace, and contentment.”
Peck, who most recently starred in the reboot of “iCarly” and “How I Met Your Father,” married wife Paige O’Brien Peck in June 2017. The couple shares two sons, Max Milo, 4, and Shai Miller, 1.
Source: PEOPLE
