“I don’t think I would be alive. I’m an addict. I’m a recovering alcoholic. If I hadn’t found acting…acting is the only thing that made me want to ever get sober.”
Kristin Davis, best known for her role as Charlotte York on the hit HBO series Sex and the City, revealed in a recent interview that she credits her acting career with helping her beat alcoholism.
Davis discussed her sober journey on the Origins With James Andrew Miller podcast, Entertainment Weekly reports.
“I don’t think I would be alive,” without her career. “I’m an addict. I’m a recovering alcoholic. If I hadn’t found acting…acting is the only thing that made me want to ever get sober. I didn’t have anything that was that important to me other than trying to dull my senses.”
Davis said she started drinking when she was young.
“I didn’t think I would live to be 30,” she said. “Luckily I quit very young, before any success happened, thank goodness.”
With her acting career, Davis realized she had “something that was more important to me than just drinking.”
As a teen growing up in Southern California, Davis drank to help calm her insecurities.
“I’m kind of shy normally, so I felt like I needed help,” she explained. “One thing led to another, and I was drinking.”
Davis then turned to acting, but then she started showing up to her classes hung over, and she knew she had to make a choice. She told The Week, “I thought, It’s going to be one or the other. I can’t really have both.”
After attending rehab, Davis confessed she would miss drinking on occasion. “Every once in a while, I’ll be with friends and they’ll be drinking red wine, and I’ll think, in a really innocent way, ‘Oh wow, that’s such a wonderful glass of red wine. Wouldn’t it be fun to drink it?’ Maybe it would be fine, but it’s really not worth the risk.”
At the same time, Sex and the City made the Cosmo a very popular drink, and as Davis told Health in 2011, “It’s caused a lot of confusion out in the world. I get sent many a Cosmo! I never drink them. I believe [alcoholism] is a disease. I don’t think you can mess with it. There was a time when people who didn’t know me well would say, ‘Couldn’t you just have one glass of champagne?’ And I would say, ‘No.’ I’m doing well. I still have occasional bad days. Why risk it?”
