After posting a video where his three-year-old twins call him an alcoholic, Kevin Zegers later explained his decision to inform them about his condition.
Kevin Zegers won praise for his response to online uproar about a post on his Instagram page in which his young children described their father as an “alcoholic.” Zegers, 34, an award-winning actor whose credits include Transamerica, Fear the Walking Dead and most recently, Dirty John, is currently in recovery for alcohol dependency, which in his response, he described as “part of his life.”
He defended his decision to inform his children about his condition as an effort teach the girls “some empathy and understanding about addiction,” and chose to share the video as a means of “crack[ing] the window open so others can see what’s possible on the other side.”
In the video, posted on January 22, 2019, Zegers’ wife, talent agent Jamie Feld, is heard asking the couple’s twin three-year-old daughters, “What is Daddy?” Both answer, “An alcoholic.” She then asks them where Zegers is at that moment, and then tells them that he is at an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting. Zegers himself added the caption, “Learning ’em young. #aameeting.”
While response from some of Zegers’ followers was positive, others considered the couple’s transparency as giving the children information that may beyond their understanding.
On January 23, 2019, Zegers himself posted a response to the latter followers, which began simply with “Being in recovery is a part of my life. Being an ‘alcoholic” doesn’t mean that I drink.”
Zegers went on to explain that his decision to inform his daughters about his condition was inspired by their own questions about where he was at their bedtime. “Instead of lying to them, or projecting an archaic stigma, we choose to tell them the truth. ‘Daddy’s at a meeting,’” he wrote.
In addition to imparting “empathy and understanding” about addiction on his children, Zegers also hoped that they would come to understand that inspite of his dependency, he has “chosen to live a clean and sober life that involves much more than drinking” for the past eight years.
He also noted that his decision to make the video public was an attempt to directly address people like those who posted negative or questioning comments, whom he described as “want[ing] to share people with addiction and mental health issues back into the shadows. My choice is to crack the window open so others can see what’s possible on the other side.”
Zegers has been frank about his alcohol dependency in the past. In a 2013 interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Zegers said that while he never drank while working on a film or television show, he did find that his career had leveled off after the critical success of Transamerica in 2006 because he either refused or “messed up, either intentionally or unintentionally” film projects that followed because of his struggles with alcohol. “But once I actually got sober, things started falling back into the order they were before,” he noted.
