‘Two and a Half Men’: Jon Cryer Dishes on Working With Charlie Sheen Amid ‘Internet S—storm’

Few celebrities are synonymous with public meltdowns as much as Charlie Sheen, whose own self-inflicted spectacle began with his firing from the long-running CBS sitcom, Two and a Half Men. Now, in an interview with PEOPLETV, co-star Jon Cryer only had praise for his former co-star.

“Charlie and I really hit it off,” Cryer said. “We had a great first few years on that show. It was incredibly smooth, we had a lovely time, it was working really well.” He also speculated that Sheen resumed his drug habit after divorcing from then-wife Denise Richards. “At first he could handle it, and he was still incredibly professional — and still lovely, by the way, to everybody on set — but you could just see that stuff was wearing on him.”

Sheen starred as the philandering bachelor Charlie Harper for the first eight seasons. However, the show halted production of Season 8 in 2010 after Sheen made disparaging comments about creator Chuck Lorre. He was replaced by Ashton Kutcher after Season 9 opened with a funeral for his character, who’d been written off the show.

“It was one of the first internet s—storms, plus there’s the fact that all of our jobs are tied into this guy, and we’re all his friends,” Cryer recalled. “It was very, very strange and [there were] aspects of it that I absolutely hated, but you know, I’m thankful for the years that were great.”

Back in September, Richards claimed that her ex-husband owed her close to a half-million dollars in back child support, claiming that he had “squandered over $24,000,000 from the sale in his interest in Two and a Half Men to pay his personal debts and to support his extravagant lifestyle at the expense of support payments for his children,” according to court documents. They also alleged that Sheen failed to pay child support while “converting thousands of dollars into cash for his own personal use.”

Sheen refuted Richards’ claim in a statement to The Blast, saying that “D and her legal posse traffic only in fiction… my day in court is painfully overdue,” Sheen said. “She is behaving like a coward and the truth will prevail.”

More recently, Corey Feldman claimed that Sheen had sexually assaulted Corey Haim in his self-released documentary My Truth: The Rape of Two Coreys. A representative for the Two and a Half Men alum dismissed the remarks, calling them “sick, twisted and outlandish allegations.”