Amanda Bynes Has Made Her Triumphant Return & Here’s All The Tea She Spilt
Today is a miraculous day. Not just because I managed to squeeze three coffees into the first 30 minutes of my morning, but because Amanda Bynes has made her triumphant return to the spotlight in a cover story for PAPER Magazine.
Some of us know Bynes as a comedic genius, who gifted us with iconic performances in The Amanda Show, She’s The Man and Easy A. Speaking for myself, as a young kid with Nickelodeon Amanda-fucking-Bynes was my absolute hero.
Some others will recall Bynes as the girl that had some kind of breakdown back in 2013 and proceeded to start a Twitter beef with Rihanna, along with throwing a lot of other bonkers accusations around. Oh, and she said that she wanted Drake to ‘murder her vagina’.
Since retiring from acting and starting to study at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Bynes has disappeared from the public eye. But she’s back baby and ‘breaking the internet’ on the cover of PAPER.
Here’s some of the tea she spilt in the interview!
On getting high and sending out bonkers tweets:
“I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would. And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me. It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad.
“Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter,” she said, adding “[When I was high] It was like an alien had literally invaded my body.”
On her iconic performance in She’s The Man:
“When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy.”
She added that seeing herself with short hair and sideburns was “a super strange and out-of-body experience. It just really put me into a funk.”
On kickstarting Channing Tatum’s career:
“I totally fought for Channing [to get cast in] that movie [She’s The Man] because he wasn’t famous yet. He’d just done a Mountain Dew commercial and I was like, ‘This guy’s a star — every girl will love him!’ But [the producers] were like, ‘He’s so much older than all of you!’ And I was like, ‘It doesn’t matter! Trust me!'”
On quitting 2011 movie Hall Pass:
“[It was a] mixture of being so high that I couldn’t remember my lines and not liking my appearance.”
“I did leave,” she says. “It was definitely completely unprofessional of me to walk off and leave them stranded when they’d spent so much money on a set and crew and camera equipment and everything.”
On her role in Easy A:
“I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it. I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me.
“I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things.”
On retiring from acting:
“If I was going to retire [the right way], I should’ve done it in a press statement — but I did it on Twitter. Real classy! But, you know, I was high and I was like, ‘You know what? I am so over this’ so I just did it. But it was really foolish and I see that now. I was young and stupid.”
On what she learnt from her breakdown:
“My advice to anyone who is struggling with substance abuse would be to be really careful because drugs can really take a hold of your life. Everybody is different, obviously, but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain.
“There are gateway drugs—and thankfully I never did heroin or meth or anything like that—but certain things that you think are harmless, they may actually affect you in a more harmful way.
“Be really, really careful because you could lose it all and ruin your entire life like I did.”
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Now, bring in the dancing lobsters!
