Why Alex Winter Quit Hollywood for 10 YearsWhy Alex Winter Quit Hollywood for 10 Years
Really Good Shares
Alex Winter talks with A.J. Daulerio about leaving Hollywood for a decade, living with PTSD, and returning to intense creative work with a stronger recovery toolkit. Their chat focuses on equanimity, meditation, and how to chase big projects without losing emotional sobriety.
1:00:14•22 Apr 2026
Alex Winter on Fame, Equanimity and Taking a Decade Off From Hollywood
Episode Overview
- Stepping away from a successful acting career gave Alex space to separate his real self from his public image.
- Meditation, regular meetings, and basic habits like sleep, diet and exercise are central pillars of his recovery.
- Joy, for Alex, means emotional evenness rather than extreme highs or lows, especially in sobriety.
- Physical training and mental preparation allowed him to handle the emotional weight and stamina of performing Waiting for Godot on Broadway.
- Learning to pause before reacting helps him be firm and clear in creative work without causing unnecessary damage.
“Joy to me is equanimity, it's sanity, it's serenity… I'm not way up here, I'm not way down here, I'm just in this really sort of even place.”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This conversation between host A.J. Daulerio and actor-director Alex Winter hangs out in that messy, honest space where creativity, recovery and fame all collide. You’ll hear Alex talk about why he walked away from Hollywood in his mid‑20s, right after Bill & Ted and his film *Freaked*.
He describes being a child actor who hated having so many eyes on him, feeling split between who he really was and who the public thought he was. That tension, mixed with PTSD and early fame, eventually pushed him out of LA and into a quieter decade of commercials, writing and starting a family. These days, Alex is back on stage and behind the camera, but with very different tools.
He shares how meditation, meetings, and a simple checklist of sleep, diet and exercise underpin his mental health. For him, joy isn’t a big high; “joy to me is equanimity, it's sanity, it's serenity… I'm just in this really sort of even place.” There’s plenty here for anyone trying to balance recovery with ambition.
Alex talks about training for his recent Broadway run in *Waiting for Godot* with Keanu Reeves, preparing for a role where his character wants to die every night on stage, while staying emotionally sober in real life. He also gets into the art of the pause on set: feeling dysregulated, choosing not to blow things up, and finding more skillful ways to be “difficult” without being an arse. Along the way, A.J.
opens up about his own creative anxiety, sobriety, and the emotional toll of writing a memoir. Their back‑and‑forth is funny, self-aware, and sharply honest. If you’re trying to stay sane while doing big, scary, creative things in recovery, what kind of “evenness” are you actually aiming for?
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