Growing up in the spotlight. Amanda Bynes made her Hollywood debut as a child and has experienced some ups and downs throughout her time in the public eye.
The actress got her start as the youngest cast member of Nickelodeon‘s All That in 1998, making a name for herself as a young comedian. Eventually, she became the star of The Amanda Show, which ran on the network from 1999 until 2002. Amid her time on Nickelodeon, the California native started branching out and nabbed other TV and movie roles. In fact, some of her most famous flicks are still popular today.
In 2006, Amanda starred alongside Channing Tatum in She’s the Man, in which she plays a character named Viola who dressed up as her twin brother in order to play soccer at an elite boarding school. At the time, the movie was a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. During a candid interview with Paper Magazine in November 2018, the Big Fat Liar star called the movie “an interesting experience.”
She explained: “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. … I’ve never told anyone that.”
Amanda went on to say that watching the film was “a super strange and out-of-body experience” that “really put me into a funk.” However, she continued to act in movies like Hairspray, Sydney White and Easy A — which has since become her final acting role. Following the movie’s premiere, she retired from acting with a Twitter post.
“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,” she told Paper of her role as Marianne Bryant. “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.”
In 2012, the actress faced a series of legal troubles. She was arrested for a DUI, which was dropped in 2014. At the time, CNN reported that she was sentenced with three years probation. Amid her struggles, the actress was placed in a conservatorship, which she filed to terminate in February 2022.
Amanda revealed during her Paper magazine feature that she had been “sober” for “almost four years.” She continued, “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.”
Scroll through our gallery to see Amanda’s transformation over the years.
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