14 DAY TRIAL // Late last month, Wentworth Miller turned down an invitation from Putin to attend a film festival in Russia because of the new anti-gay law, which he opposed because he too was gay. Speaking at an event over the weekend, the actor made a couple of very startling revelations.
Miller, who starred in the hit TV series “Prison Break” and had been occasionally plagued by gay rumors which he never addressed, spoke at the Human Rights Campaign Dinner in Seattle.
Three excerpts from his speech are embedded below and they are enough to paint a clear picture of how much he struggled with coming out.
Wentworth first tried to kill himself when he was 15 because, he says, he “wanted out.” He did not believe things would ever get better and he did not feel as if he belonged anywhere.
More importantly, he was sick of pretending to be someone he was not.
“Every day was a test and there was a thousand ways to fail. A thousand ways to betray yourself. To not come up to someone else's standard as to what was acceptable and what was normal,” Miller says.
“And when you fail the test, which was guaranteed, there was a price to pay. Emotional, psychological. Physical. And like many of you I paid that price. The first time I tried to kill myself, I was 15,” the actor continues.
“I waited until my family went away for the weekend. I was alone in the house and I swallowed a bottle of pills. I don’t remember what happened over the next couple of days, but I’m pretty sure come Monday morning, I was on the bus back to school pretending everything was fine,” he says.
His first suicide attempt wasn’t a cry for help, he explains because, “you only cry for help if you believe there is help to cry for. And I didn’t need it, I wanted out… at 15.”
During the same speech, Miller explains that things only got worse when he became famous because, all of a sudden, he had to live up to even more standards, to think of an image that had nothing to do with who he was in real life.
The actor also offers more details on why he decided to come out now the way he did. Check it out.