Table of Contents
Jason Bateman reveals that he got sober in 2004 mainly to ease the “tension” in his marriage
Jason Bateman reveals that he didn’t become “California sober” until 2004 — three years after he and wife Amanda Anka started their 24-year marriage. Amanda had been the one to greatly encourage Jason to give up drinking and using cocaine, which she humorously referred to as “the Scarface stuff.”
“Amanda and I certainly renegotiated a couple of times about when the spigot of the partying was going to be completely turned off,” said the 57-year-old actor to The Hollywood Reporter magazine on Wednesday. “She would say, ‘This drip, drip, drip is annoyingly unpredictable, Jason’.”
Bateman revealed that when he started his soberness, he felt it was “six months away” but after a few back and forths, he ended up deciding to quit much sooner. “If right now I could land this plane, a lot of the tension would be gone, so let’s just f—ing do it,” he said.
Anka, a former actress, said that Bateman’s partying lifestyle in Hollywood even led to a delay in their dating. After their first meeting at an LA Kings game in 1988, she held off on dating him for almost 10 years. “I just wasn’t into where he was at,” Anka said in the 2013 interview with GQ.
Jason Bateman Chooses to Live a Quiet Life After Sobriety
According to Amanda Anka, her husband’s personality sees quite a bit of changes each time he gets sober. “The other day I was telling my friends that I am the only one who’s husband I can’t get him off the couch to go to a party,” she revealed. “This is a man who went with me to get frozen yogurt before coming home.”
Apparently, the chill lifestyle has been retained. Bateman’s close pal Jimmy Kimmel shared with THR, “It’s like he hardly ever goes out past 10 and if he does, there’s a lot of, ‘Oh great job, Grandpa. Congratulations.'”
Kimmel recalled how he stayed away from Bateman during his heavy party period because of the “crazy stuff” that were happening backstage in early 2000s, in such cases, when people party.
Bateman and Anka, who starred in the rom-com Sol Goode in 2003, are parents of two daughters: Franny, 19, and Maple, 14.
The SmartLess co-host—who has openly admitted that he occasionally indulges in marijuana gummies—was a prodigious child actor, regularly appearing in Little House on the Prairie, Silver Spoons, and Teen Wolf Too to help support his family. But after finishing his six-season run on The Hogan Family in 1991, Bateman has revealed that he went through a party phase that lasted for years before eventually deciding to get sober.
Jason Bateman Looks Back on His Wild Times and Comeback
Jason Bateman confessed that he was lucky to have met his wild times way before the era of social media. “Luckily, I was living in a time without social media and camera phones, so I got away with quite a bit, but it was definitely close a few times,” he recalled.
The Zootopia 2 star’s career comeback was marked by his role as Michael Bluth in Mitchell Hurwitz’s satirical sitcom Arrested Development, which initially aired from 2003 to 2006 on Fox and was later brought back on Netflix from 2013 to 2019.
Bateman has since used that success as a springboard into what many would say has been his prestige era—producing, directing, and starring in Netflix’s critically acclaimed drama Ozark, followed by an apparently lucrative $100 million deal to co-host the podcast SmartLess.
Looking back on his path, the Emmy-winning director said, “When you have been standing outside looking in for so long, you develop a really good sense of what it is that really provides longevity, and it is certainly not fame or money, it is respect.”
Nevertheless, Bateman remarked that, “I still feel like I’m trying not to be a child-actor failure. I am still trying to break through.”
Jason Bateman is in talks with HBO Max for a set of new series and producing projects
Jason Bateman has lined up a new project where he will be executive producing and also starring as Clark in Steve Conrad’s seven-episode series DTF St. Louis that will be airing on HBO Max from March 1. The show is a black comedy and a murder mystery that revolves around a love triangle, where one middle-aged character ends up being killed.
The series will have David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Richard Jenkins, Joy Sunday, and Peter Sarsgaard as the cast members.
Bateman via his production company, Aggregate Films, is also supporting Courteney Cox directing film number two, Evil Genius, featuring David Harbour, Patricia Arquette, Ryan Eggold, and Thomas Michael Allen.
The indie crime thriller is a loose adaptation of the 2018 Netflix docuseries that focused on the 2003 death of a pizza delivery man, Brian Wells.