Paula Patton says her son played a crucial role in supporting her when she made one of her life’s biggest decisions.
Patton, who stars as a woman dealing with addiction in the new movie “Finding Faith,” credits her son, Julian, 15, for helping her when she decided to get sober.
“My son, he is my best friend,” she said of Julian, whom she shares with ex-husband Robin Thicke, on the 3rd Hour of TODAY Aug. 7. “Listen, so when I got sober, it just changed my life. He and our neighbor … they were my two best friends. And I got to live life again, like a kid through him and her, and it gives you all the reasons to want to live.”
Patton, who has also starred in “Hitch,” “Precious” and “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” said this new role in “Finding Faith” spoke to her.
“A lot of things mirrored my life, and I thought how can I not be honest about what I’ve been experiencing, that seven years ago I got sober. I know what it is to be in chaos and find your way out,” she said.
“But going back and having to play being inebriated when I hadn’t been inebriated for seven years, I was like, ‘How am I going to do that?’ And it was kind of scary, and I called people I knew during that time. I was like, ‘Can you remind me how I was?’ And I listened to the music that I would listen to at the time. And then there was a young woman who had recently gotten sober, and she helped me remember that mindset.”
Patton said it was similar to a “victim mindset” when “you don’t trust,” while noting it was a challenge returning to the person she used to be for the part.
“I went back. It was scary. I was scared. But then something happened. I was able to forgive myself,” she said.
“What I had realized, I had been doing all this work, but I kept being like, ‘Ugh, if you hadn’t done that,’ ‘Why’d you do that?’ ‘Oh, Paula!’ You have nightmares. It was just tough. And suddenly, playing it again, I was able to give myself grace, and just say, ‘You were doing the best you could. You didn’t know any better. And, so, now you do. Now you do better. And it’s OK.’”
Patton has previously spoken about how family helped spark her decision to get sober.
“When you get sober, it’s so funny, I just had this epiphany that I had made a choice, like, it was family, it was my life, or chaos, to be honest,” she said in June on the Atlanta radio show “Big Tigger Morning Show.”
“So you have to find your way through it to find out who you truly are, and that can be really challenging,” she added. “There’s a lot of time alone and having to face myself and memories and such, but then on the other side was this joy, just joy for being a mother, joy of life. Suddenly, I just had this childlike experience, where I started to see everything through my kid’s eyes. Because he’s my best friend.”
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