Posted in: CBS, TV | Tagged: charlie sheen, jon cryer, Two And A Half Men

Two and a Half Men: Jon Cryer Compares Sheen Situation to Kim Jong-il

Jon Cryer on CBS's treatment of his Two and a Half Men co-star Charlie Sheen being similar to how North Korea's Kim Jong-il is treated.

Published Sun, 14 Sep 2025 09:37:04 -0500

by Tom Chang

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Article Summary

Jon Cryer compares how CBS treated Charlie Sheen’s behavior on Two and a Half Men to North Korea’s Kim Jong-il’s tactics.
Cryer says he was paid one-third of Sheen’s salary, despite both being leads on Two and a Half Men.
Sheen’s destructive behavior led to his firing, and Ashton Kutcher replaced him on the hit comedy series.
Cryer wishes Sheen well but says he won’t work with him again, despite Sheen hoping for a reunion.

To say Charlie Sheen is aware of how toxic he became at the peak of his celebrity would be underselling it until you find out some of his biggest victims were former co-stars and loved ones. His latest Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen from Andrew Renzi, hardly pulls any punches on his drug-fueled tirades from bitter divorces and his meltdown against creator Chuck Lorre and co-star Jon Cryer during season eight of Two and a Half Men that led to his firing. While the troubled actor has mended fences with Lorre to even appear on his HBO Max comedy Bookie for both seasons, the scars still run deep on Cryer, who admitted in the documentary that he had a full head of hair before the show, which ran from 2003-2015, and was paid significantly less than Sheen during their run.

Two and a Half Men Star Jon Cryer on Dealing with Charlie Sheen's Demands, Likening Them to North Korea's Kim Jong-Il

With Sheen's firing after season eight, Lorre brought in Ashton Kutcher to play the original character, Walden Schmidt, for the final four seasons to play opposite Cryer and Angus T. Jones' Alan and Jake Harper. The original premise of the show was that Sheen's Charlie Harper took his brother and nephew in following Alan's divorce. With Sheen being written out as "killed" in season nine, Walden steps into the picture as the trio stays in Charlie's house. While Sheen was teased for the 2015 finale, Sheen rejected the opportunity with Lorre playing "Charlie" and the character getting killed with a piano dropping on him.

"He's in the midst of falling apart in every way that I can imagine, and he's renegotiating his contract for another year of a show that I'm supposed to be on too," Cryer said in the documentary (via Entertainment Weekly) adding CBS "pre-sold a couple extra seasons of the show" meaning it was incentivized to spend more on Sheen. "The dictator of North Korea was a guy named Kim Jong-il. He acted crazy all the time and thus got enormous amounts of aid from countries who were so scared of him that they would shovel money at him. Well, that's what happened here. [Sheen's] negotiations went off the charts because his life was falling apart. Me, whose life was pretty good at that time, I got a third of that."

Cryer told The View in 2024 that he doesn't see himself working with Sheen again after eight years on Two and a Half Men, but wished him the best. He also said in the documentary that he no longer wanted to be part of the destructive cycle Sheen was perpetually in. Sheen, who couldn't contact Cryer for the documentary, relied on Renzi to reach out and film his segment. Upon hearing his words for the doc, he publicly reached out to Cryer to "DM him" his number. If Sheen reaches him, the actor expressed interest in a TAAHM revival in hopes of getting Cryer to change his mind. aka Charlie Sheen is available on Netflix.

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