Corrie Sean: My porn agony
FORMER Corrie star Sean Ward’s porn addiction was so severe his hair fell out.
The actor, who played drug dealer Callum Logan, admitted he was so hooked on pornography that he couldn’t have sex with his girlfriend.
Sean, 30, also battled addictions to drink and drugs that left him depressed and contemplating suicide.
“With porn addiction, because of the energy that is released through it, it depletes you,” he says. “I started getting alopecia and I had no energy. I started losing weight.
“I had to leave the relationship I was in. I wasn’t looking after my partner’s sexual needs. There was no intimacy. You get desensitised. Porn can affect your mental health, it’s all connected in your brain.
“It’s pixels on a screen – you’re never going to get love from that. Porn ruins relationships.”
Sean also became hooked on alcohol and cannabis, which left him in a “coma-like state”, barely sleeping. He adds: “I’m an actor – I’ve always had a little puff here and there. You sometimes think it helps you create a character but it just makes you as dopey as hell.
“Cannabis slows you down, makes you depressed and overthink things.
“You don’t sleep. It was like being in a drug-induced coma every night. And I was hitting the bottle hard.
Sucks
“Alcohol is called a spirit because it sucks the spirit out of you.
“To start to get better, it was finding out what my addictions were and where I was going wrong.
“You have to admit to yourself that you’re on a bad path.”
Sean played evil Callum in Corrie from 2014 to 2016, becoming one of the show’s most villainous characters.
As the abusive ex-boyfriend of Kylie Platt and father to her son, Max, the council estate drug dealer came back on
the scene after learning she’d found happiness with David Platt.
His role earned him nominations for Best Newcomer and Best Villain at the British Soap Awards 2015.
During the soap’s live episode in 2016 he was bludgeoned to death with a wrench when Kylie (Paula Lane) walked in on him attacking and trying to rape
Sarah (Tina O’Brien).
He was then bundled up in a children’s blanket and dumped under the wet cement in Gail’s extension. While on the show he began a relationship with co-star Georgia May Foote.
The pair had a bitter split when she left the show to join Strictly Come Dancing and began dating her dance partner Giovanni Pernice.
Sean, who also starred in Our
Girl opposite Michelle Keegan, partly blames his role in Corrie for his addiction struggles. Not only did he find it difficult to tell who wanted to be his friend just because he was famous, he couldn’t cope when the work dried up.
He says: “The more people I met when I got in Corrie, the lonelier I got. “Then I was away from home for about seven months doing Our Girl, away from my partner and my family, and that’s lonely too. Any person in this industry has ups and downs.
Crazy
“I went from living next door to Justin Bieber in South Africa while we filmed Our Girl to living in West Didsbury and not working the next. It’s crazy.”
Last year Sean went through 50 gruelling auditions but failed to get a single job. And that, combined with scanning social media and seeing other people with their apparently perfect lives, also contributed to his depression. Appearing on Loose Women yesterday he said: “I wasn’t getting any work – I did 50 auditions last year and didn’t get one job. The resentment was building and then you go online and you’re just bitter.”
Things came to a head for Sean when he realised his new circle of so-called friends were helping to feed his addictions.
“The point I realised I needed to sort myself out was when I finally put down the drink,” he explains. “I had friends come up from London and all they did was bring vodka to my house and I realised they weren’t really my friends.
“So I lost it with them and was like: ‘Get out’. I haven’t had a drink since. I went cold turkey just like that.
“It was just a massive shift in my consciousness – I cannot continue on this path. I just stopped looking at porn as well and it’s the hardest thing. I have to not take my phone to bed, you have to lock it away.”
Now Sean is using his Instagram page to share his journey and help others going through the same thing.
He says: “Male suicide is on the rise and I want to make sure the younger generation don’t go through hell.”