Emilio Estevez looked back on his father Martin Sheen’s experience on the set of 1976’s Apocalypse Now.
“In the documentary Hearts of Darkness, they collapsed time and portrayed his breakdown, sort of, toward the end of the schedule, when in fact it was early in the schedule when my dad was celebrating his birthday in August,” Estevez, 62, said during a recent taping of the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast. “So, it was August 3, and we had come. I had gotten there in July, so … he has this meltdown on set because he was celebrating his birthday and he was drinking.”
According to Estevez, his father, now 84, had been “isolated in his room” between takes.
“I was there. I watched it happen, and I was there when they carted him out,” Estevez said. “He was ranting and raging and screaming. They were shooting in a courthouse … in a building that was used for Night Court. It was upstairs, where the apartment or the hotel room [was] where they found him and carried him out. Well, they actually did that. We carried him out that night.”
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While Estevez had previously “seen [his] dad drunk before,” it was never on the “same level” as it was that evening.
“And certainly not this publicly,” Estevez quipped. “He demanded to go into the courtroom [and] says, ‘If I don’t go in there.’ He’s screaming at my mom, ‘I need to go into that courtroom because if I don’t go in there, some poor son of a bitch is gonna go to jail for masturbating in front of a pig.’”
He continued, “And Francis [Ford Coppola, the director] was like, ‘Martin, Martin, no.’ It was hilarious.”
Estevez and his mother, Janet Sheen, were eventually able to corral Martin into a waiting car. (Martin and Janet also share son Charlie Sheen.)
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“We started driving, God knows where, somewhere away where we could get him calm down,” Estevez said. “He announced to everyone in the car that he had to pee, so we pull over to the side of the road and he got out and ran naked into the jungle and kept going.”
Janet ended up chasing Martin down, urging him to return to the vehicle. The acclaimed actor then asked to stop for another restroom break, some “10 minutes later.”
“My mom says, ‘Martin, you have cried wolf too many times. You can piss all over yourself,’” Estevez remembered. “I’m sure they’re going to be horrified I told that story, but it happened. Those are the stories that I don’t think anyone has ever heard.”
