Recently out actor Wentworth Miller revealed over the weekend that
he attempted to kill himself several times as a teenager.
“The first time I tried to kill myself I was 15,” Miller told
a Seattle audience attending the Human Rights Campaign's annual gala.
“I waited until my family went away for the weekend and 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.”
The 41-year-old Miller publicly came out gay last month in the
course of declining an invitation to attend a film festival in
Russia.
(Related: Wentworth
Miller declines Russian film festival invite; says he's gay.)
“Growing up, I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing
the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a
test and there [were] a thousand ways to fail. A thousand ways to
portray yourself to not live up to someone else's standard of what
was accepted, what was normal.”
Miller
said that he remained publicly closeted because “when I thought
about the possibility of coming out, how that might impact me and the
career I worked so hard for, I was filled with fear.” (The video
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