Hollywood is not an easy place to exist as an adult, and it can be even harder to navigate when you’re a child or young adult. As time has passed, details have emerged about how some child actors were treated by adults around them in the industry.
The documentary released earlier this year titled ‘Quiet On Set’ was centered around some of the abuse child actors working for the Nickelodeon channel went through. One of the actors who gained her initial fame from Nickelodeon but was noticeably absent from the documentary itself was none other than Amanda Bynes.
Global household name
It can be argued that Amanda was perhaps the biggest one of all the stars Nickelodeon produced. As she grew older, she was able to get roles in major movies and became a household name worldwide. She had moved beyond shows on Nickelodeon and was the lead in movies across the globe.
But just as her star was on the rise, the actress abruptly announced her retirement. So, what happened to Amanda Bynes?
Bynes was born in 1986 and began her career quite early on. She already had an agent by the age of 7 years old, as revealed in an interview from 2018.
By the 1990s and 2000s, she was a global household name. While her peers were in middle and high school, she was filming television shows.
Her first notable role came in Nickelodeon’s “All That” (1996-2002), which ultimately led to her own sketch show, “The Amanda Show.” She hosted the show between 1999 and 2202, starting it when she was just 13 years old.
Soon after, she began starring in major Hollywood films, which included “She’s the Man” in 2006 followed by “What a Girl Wants” in 2003 and then the superhit movie version of “Hairspray”.
But in 2010, she abruptly decided to ‘retire’ from acting. Her last acting credit in a movie was ‘Easy A’ in the same year.
So what happened to make the actress want to ‘retire’ from her career just when it was beginning to take off?
In 2018, she gave an interview where she outlined the struggles she had gone through. At the time of the interview, she revealed she had been sober for around four years. She shared how when she first joined the industry she wasn’t interested in the parties, but that eventually changed.
She explained: “I started smoking marijuana when I was 16. Even though everyone thought I was the ‘good girl,’ I did smoke marijuana from that point on. I didn’t get addicted (then) and I wasn’t abusing it. And I wasn’t going out and partying or making a fool of myself … yet.”
She later progressed to other drugs, saying: “Later it progressed to doing molly and ecstasy.” She went on to explain that she had tried cocaine but did not like it.
She said she also tried Adderall which she abused after getting a prescription from a psychiatrist by pretending to have symptoms of attention deficit disorder. She had read something about the drug helping people keep skinny, according to her interview in Paper magazine.
After she saw herself in the film Easy A, she was upset, explaining that she disliked how she looked. She recalled the instance later on: “I saw it and I was convinced that I should never be on camera again and I officially retired on Twitter, which was, you know, also stupid.”
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But without a sense of purpose, she said she “got really into my drug usage” and “was just stuck at home, getting high, watching TV and tweeting.”
There are some who believe that she may have been abused at the hands of adults she worked with as a child. Tatyana Arrington, an entertainment journalist and pop culture expert, believes this to be the case.
She said: “A big issue many point to is her relationship with Dan Schneider, the creator of The Amanda Show. Their dynamic always seemed a little off, and now, with the allegations that have surfaced against Schneider, some people think Amanda was one of his early victims, though she’s never confirmed that herself.”
She went on to recall some instances which did not sit well with her. Arrington said: “Schneider even supported Amanda’s attempt to get emancipated from her parents when she was still a teenager. He claimed that a lot of young actors, like Macaulay Culkin and Drew Barrymore, were doing the same thing at the time. But why Amanda wanted it? That’s still a bit fuzzy. Some think it had to do with her rocky relationship with her father, Rick Bynes. There were reports that he was verbally and physically abusive, but Amanda later walked back on those claims many believe which was out of fear.”
Arrington questioned a lot of things, saying: “Either way, their relationship was clearly complicated. On top of that, Amanda reportedly wanted more freedom at the time—whether that meant moving in with her boyfriend or doing things like drugs, sex, and alcohol, which is something a lot of Hollywood parents struggle with, especially when their kid is the breadwinner. How do you even set rules in that situation?””
In 2013, her troubles with the law, bouts of tweeting bizarre things, and her worrying appearance when she went out in public, caused her parents to file for a conservatorship. A judge granted her mother, Lynn, temporary conservatorship to protect Bynes and her estate. This came after Bynes was placed on a 5150 – a psychiatric hold – in the same year she set a neighbor’s driveway on fire.
In 2012, she was then arrested for driving under the influence, and in 2013 she was arrested for reckless endangerment and criminal possession of marijuana. In 2013, according to a report, she had tossed a bong out of her window in New York.
In 2022, the actress filed for a petition to end her conservatorship. At the time her attorney said: “She believes her condition is improved and protection of the court is no longer necessary.”
Her conservatorship was subsequently terminated in March 22, 2022.
In summer 2023, Amanda Bynes was taken into police custody, according to reports from the Los Angeles Police Department. Officers handcuffed Bynes after receiving a call from a woman in distress. The incident was the third one in the same year for Bynes.
Currently, it seems the former child star has no plans of returning to her career as an actress. It is honestly heartbreaking to see how she was once one of the most promising young stars of her generation and then went through so many troubles which ended up derailing her career.
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