Bronson Pinchot is recalling his drastic transition from being “completely out of money” to Hollywood stardom.
Pinchot, 65, recalled on the Monday, April 7, episode of the “Pod Meets World” podcast that he was “so poor” when Beverly Hills Cop was released in 1984, to the point where he was “at the end of my tether.”
“Somebody had given me as a Christmas present the littlest, stingiest gift basket you can imagine. It was a packet of water crackers, a Granny Smith apple and a little chunk — not even a whole thing — of cheddar cheese. And I had nothing else to eat,” he said. “So every day I would take a sliver of the apple and a sliver of the cheese and one cracker and eat it till I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then do it again, and the apple was starting to go brown.”
When the movie was released, a pal told Pinchot to read a review on his Beverly Hills Cop performance in Newsweek magazine. While he was walking to the supermarket to read it, Pinchot crossed paths with teenagers — which was when he realized his life had changed.
“On my way home, a car full of teenagers drove off of Point Statia Avenue and onto the sidewalk and came right up to, like, three feet in front of me and jumped out and started hugging me,” he said. “And that’s when they happened.”
When he was “really famous,” Pinchot said that the “level of craziness” was hard for him to even grasp now. He recalled that the first house he ever bought was the home where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio lived after tying the knot in 1954 — which caused a frenzy outside of his residence.
“I was not ready to come out of the egg. I was not ready to be a person, for sure. I had never had money. I’d grown up on welfare and then been, you know, eating a browning apple,” Pinchot said of his fame. “It was kind of like taking a toddler and saying, ‘Here, you’re going to drive this submarine and you’ll be fine.’ I was not equipped to do anything at all except play the character.”
While Pinchot recalled fans praising him for his performance, he suffered through different emotions behind-the-scenes.
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“I would play the thing, and people would make, you know, they would roar and love it,” he said. “And then I’d get in my car to drive home and I would fantasize about a truck hitting me head on because I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how to do anything except do that performance. I wanted it to stop but I didn’t know how to tell anybody.”
He continued, “It was really almost like being — if you took a chair and waved a wand over it and said, ‘Now you’re a person,’ and they don’t really know how to fake being a person. They just wait for the enchantment to be over. It was just too soon.”
Pinchot noted that it was more than the fact that he was “a guy with no money who suddenly had money.” Instead, he said it was that he “was the person who didn’t even know how to be a person.”
“I was playing the happiest, most optimistic, loving person alive, and I was the most unhappy. I was afraid to go get treatment because I was afraid, ‘What if they fixed me and then I couldn’t act anymore?’” he recalled. “That turned out not to be the case, because it just gave me more control over my acting and it gave me better access. But because of that doubt, I waited until 1996 to go get help. And by that point, if somebody says something that I thought was hurtful or whatever, I would go dark for like three days. And when I say dark, I mean zombie. So I finally got sorted out. And then I started to enjoy myself and live and do Broadway and do the West End and I was like, ‘Oh, is this what it’s like?’”
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