Charlie Sheen on How a Drug Dealer Helped Save His Life and Wanting a ‘Two and a Half Men’ Reunion: ‘It Would Be a Gift to the Fans’

SPOILER ALERT: The following story includes details about the documentary “aka Charlie Sheen,” premiering on Netflix on Sept. 10.

Charlie Sheen is back.

Sort of.

The actor is not only almost eight years sober, but he’s telling his story in a new two-part Netflix documentary series, “aka Charlie Sheen.”

Directed by Andrew Renzi (“Pepsi, Where’s My Jet”), “aka” chronicles Sheen’s rise to fame in the 1980s and 90s and his horrific and very public drug-fueled meltdown in 2011. His “tiger blood” and “winning” spiral resulted in him being fired from “Two and a Half Men.”

“It’s kind of hard to watch, but I think it’s important to watch,” Sheen, who turned 60 on Sept. 3, told me Thursday at the doc’s premiere at the Tudum Theater in Hollywood. “Let’s chart a path where or chart a course where we don’t make those kind of decisions and wind up something that looks like that again.”

Also walking the carpet were his ex-wife Denise Richards, Heidi “Hollywood Madam” Fleiss and Sheen’s former drug dealer Marco.

Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards at Netflix’s “aka Charlie Sheen” premiere in Hollywood.Variety via Getty Images

In an unbelievable twist of circumstances, Marco played a pivotal role in getting Sheen clean.

“What we don’t know is he was really close friends with his drug dealer and his drug dealer is one of the reasons he got sober,” Renzi said. “There was a time when everything was going bad where Charlie’s father [Martin Sheen] and Charlie’s therapist approached Marco and said, ‘Could you just help us get him off of drugs?’ So he just stopped giving him strong drugs to eventually he was just giving him baking soda and he got off drugs that way. You can’t write that.”

Sheen noted, “It’s kind of the moon landing of a solution inside of that insanity. It just made sense to give that a shot.”

And it made sense to reach out to Marco to be in the doc. “Renzi and I were talking about it and we were like, ‘What documentary about drugs and insane behavior has ever included the person’s actual dealer?’ We couldn’t think of one example and so Renzi was like, ‘You think he’ll do it?’” Sheen recalled. “I rang him up and asked him and he said, ‘Let me sit with Renzi for an hour and I’ll let you know.’”

Marco and Andrew Renzi at Netflix’s “aka Charlie Sheen” premiere in Hollywood.Getty Images for Netflix

While some of Sheen’s family members, including two of his five children and his brother Roman Estévez, are interviewed in the doc, his father Martin Sheen and brother Emilio Estévez declined to participate. “Renzi and I, a year ago, showed them a rough cut of a couple episodes and they loved it and they both decided, ‘This this is your story. We don’t want to get in the way,’” Charlie explained. “Dad was so pleased with all of the archival of him that he said, ‘What you have of me is representative enough.’”

Martin and Emilio have seen the final cut. “I got the nicest message from Emilio, one of the nicest messages I’ve received from someone,” Renzi said.

Sheen beamed when I asked him about his relationship with his family today: “It’s great. I just saw them for my birthday and we’re really really tight.”

Sheen’s “Two and a Half Men” co-star Jon Cryer appears in the doc, but Sheen hasn’t spoken to him in quite some time. While show creator Chuck Lorre killed off Sheen’s character, the actor said he would love an on-screen reunion of their hit CBS sitcom. “It would be wild and I would want to do it,” he said. “I think it would be a gift to the fans…For me personally, it would also put a bookend on it to close that thing how it should have closed.”

The doc’s premiere next week coincides with the release of Sheen’s memoir, “The Book of Sheen.” The “Platoon” star admitted there were times during his active addiction that he thought he’d be better off dead: “But then you got a bunch of kids and you’re kind of thinking about what that day is gonna be like for them, what they’re gonna have to deal with, and then how they feel about you for their entire life if you take the chicken exit.”