Dennis Quaid spoke about his addiction to cocaine in an interview on “Megyn Kelly Today” released on Monday.
“I was basically doing cocaine pretty much on a daily basis during the ’80s,” the 64-year-old Quaid said, admitting that cocaine “was even [included] in some movie budgets,” in the 1960s and ’70s.
“I spent many, many a night screaming at God to please take this away from me — ‘I’ll never do it again. Because I’ve only got an hour before I have to be at work,’” he said.
He added, “And then, about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I would go, ‘That’s not so bad.’ But I had what I call a white light experience, where I saw myself either dead or losing everything that meant anything to me.”
After that experience, Quaid explained his addiction to his fiancée at the time, actress Meg Ryan, then said he sought treatment and went to rehab.
“That was the end of the love affair with cocaine, and I didn’t play music for a while because it was so connected,” he said. “I meditated for 10 years straight.”
Quaid, who starred in “The Big Easy” and “Parent Trap,” said the same things (nearly word for word) in an essay he wrote for Newsweek in 2011 about his addiction. He said he began doing cocaine after he graduated from college and made his way to Hollywood in 1974.
“Coming from where I came from — lower-middle-class life, from Houston into Hollywood — and all of a sudden this success starts happening to you, I just didn’t know how to handle that,” he wrote. “Doing blow just contributed to me not being able to handle the fame, which, at the time, I guess I felt I didn’t deserve.”
He continued, “I was doing my best imitation of an asshole there for a little while, trying to pretend everything was OK. Meanwhile my life was falling apart, and I noticed it myself, but I was hoping everyone else didn’t.”
Head to Today for more of Quaid’s interview with Megyn Kelly.
