Dennis Quaid is speaking candidly about the moment he realised his cocaine addiction might kill him.
The actor, 69, recalled the ‘white light’ moment that finally drove him to seek help in the 1990s after struggling with addiction for years in a new interview.
“I remember going home and having kind of a white light experience that I saw myself either dead or in jail or losing everything I had, and I didn’t want that,” Quaid told People magazine.
The Parent Trap star said his addiction had begun to impact his career, including his band calling it quits after securing a record gig because he was “not reliable.”
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After checking himself into rehab – or ‘cocaine school’, as he called it – in 1990, Quaid said his faith saved him.
The Parent Trap actor had grown up in the Christian faith, attending a Baptist Church in his Houston, Texas hometown.
But it wasn’t until after going through his drug addiction that the actor reconnected and developed a “personal relationship” with Christianity.
The actor began rereading the bible as well as other religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Quran.
Quaid revealed that rekindling his faith helped to “fill a hole” addiction had left him with.
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“When you’re done with the addiction, you need something to fill that hole, something that really works, right?”
The actor opened up about his love for hymns growing up, explaining that he found them “self-reflective and self-examining, not churchy.”
In 1990, he turned to his faith to write a song his mother Juanita Jordan after his rehab stint.
The song, titled On My Way to Heaven, was a way “to let her know I was OK, because I wasn’t OK before then,” Quaid shared.
In 2018, Quaid told The Sunday Times he had been using roughly two grams of cocaine per day.
The actor previously shared in a 2011 essay for News Week that cocaine was just a part of the ”budget of movies,” and something that “everyone was doing.”
“It was supplied, basically, on movie sets because everyone was doing it,” he wrote at the time.
“People would make deals. Instead of having a cocktail, you’d have a line.”
“By the time I was doing The Big Easy, in the late 1980s, I was a mess,” he wrote. “I was getting an hour of sleep a night.”
Now, after achieving sobriety, the actor tells People he is ”grateful” to be alive.
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“We’re all looking for the joy of life, and drugs give that to you and alcohol and whatever it is for anybody give that to you really quick,” Quaid reflected.
“Then they’re fun and then they’re fun with problems, and then they’re just problems after a while,” he added.
“That’s really what we’re looking for, the joy of life, which is our gift, actually, the relationship with God that we all have. It’s at the bottom of it, the joy of being alive.”
Quaid has continued to work in Hollywood, producing films such as A Dog’s Journey (2019) and Midway (2021) in recent years.
The actor has three children from his previous marriages to Meg Ryan and Kimberly Buffington, and in 2020 married his fourth wife Laura Savoie.
If you or someone you know is in need of support contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the National Drug and Alcohol Helpline on 1800 250 015.
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