‘I’ve been lying to everyone for so long’
Toronto’s Dillon Casey was a rising star in TV before drugs brought him crashing down. He tells the Star’s Tony Wong the whole story
“Are you stoned?”
Dillon Casey is standing on a Los Angeles sound stage. The set is built to look like a deserted, sand-swept planet and the 35-year-old actor is in a spacesuit, peering at his own face in the visor of his helmet. Except there is no reflection. It’s just a big, green-screened X where his eyes are supposed to be looking. And there’s another problem.
“Are you stoned?” It’s the director talking. “Your eyes look glazed.”
It’s taken Casey years to get to this point: a recurring role on the prime-time science-fiction series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC. But for the Oakville native, it would be the beginning of the end.
Strung out, he had fallen asleep in a chair in the makeup room before arriving on set. Yet there is no way he is going to admit the obvious. In front of the crew, he berates the director.
CASEY continued on E4
“How dare you? Your camera setup made my eyes looked closed. This is your f---ing problem. Not mine.”
Suddenly, and unexpectedly, there are tears. He is told to take a break. The producers would later come to check up on him in his trailer. But there would be more denials.
Later, he would apologize. The next day he sends a coffee cart, hoping a cappuccino or two will buy some goodwill. But it’s too late.
“The whole time I am thinking, ‘Why am I saying this? I am so f---ed,’ ” says Casey in an exclusive interview with the Star. “But I had no control over what I was saying. I was completely destroying myself and I knew it. But I was in denial.”
For Casey, it was a tremendous fall from grace. Certainly, this was not the way he imagined his path. Nor did he expect to be one more statistic in the opioid crisis. He wasn’t that guy. Except he was.
“I was a 31-year-old man crying and yelling at work. This was bottom and there was no coming back,” he says.
According to federal government statistics, more than 9,000 people have died in Canada from January 2016 to June 2018 because of opioids. Most of the deaths were accidental. An average of 17 people per day were hospitalized in Canada for opioid poisoning in Canada in 2017 alone.
Casey managed to avoid being a statistic. But not without cost.
Before Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Canadian Screen Awardnominated actor had the starring role in Global TV’s Remedy for two seasons (2014-15) where he played, not a little ironically, a drug-addicted medical-school dropout for two seasons to critical plaudits. Before that, he played driven U.S. navy SEAL Sean Pierce on the CW network’s spy drama Nikita.
And right out of the gate early in his career he landed a starring role as hockey player Trevor Lemonde in the CBC drama MVP in 2008. The series was short-lived, but he got to see himself on a giant billboard in his underwear in Times Square when the show debuted in the U.S.
He was the golden boy of Canadian television. So what happened? Casey, now 35, isn’t so sure either. We are in a boardroom at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Toronto, where I first interviewed him six years ago when he was starring in Nikita with actress Maggie Q.
His uniform — colourful rocker T-shirt, jeans and ribbed wool cap with a scruff of beard, the slacker outfit favoured by L.A.-based actors who are the lifeblood of the Hollywood ecosystem — hasn’t changed. He has a presence and physique not unlike a young Mark Wahlberg, but with the goofy sensibility of an Andy Samberg. Although he is often cast in action roles, he grew up wanting to do comedy.
His mother, Patrice McDonough, had a love for Second City and would take him and his brothers to shows. He would team up later in life with brothers Connor and Lyndon to write comedy sketches, including a web series that was a kind of Star Trek in a frat house.
He says when we first met, he was likely high then, too — it started a year earlier. It was his final season of Nikita. He was 28.
“I was in a movie theatre with someone I knew. He popped this giant pill in his mouth. I asked him what it was. He shrugged it off saying it was for pain in his hip. I asked him for one. I took it and the next thing I know I felt my worries melt away. And then the movie was over.”
Casey says he had taken the painkiller OxyContin. It was the start of an addiction that would consume his personal life and career.
“I was completely, wilfully ignorant to what I was doing to myself,” he says. “I made up excuses to see this person over and over so I could get more pills. It was like a choke collar around my neck getting tighter every day.”
Opioid-related overdoes are a national public-health crisis in Canada and the United States. The drugs act on the nervous system to relieve pain. Much of the overuse has come from prescription drugs, but also increasingly from toxic drugs such as fentanyl, which is many times more powerful than morphine.
The stigma around substance abuse has been a major barrier preventing addicts from getting help. That’s an issue increasingly being addressed by the government in public-education campaigns.
The last thing Casey wants is to be the poster boy for an addiction that he was ashamed of, but he thinks by speaking out he can help others. Canadian Mental Health week starts May 6.
“I’ve been lying to everyone for so long I needed to own my s--t,” he says. “And hopefully this will help someone else.”
Casey says he struggled with depression over the years; his family has a history of the disease. Opioids were the answer to the symptoms but created new ones.
“I regret every pill I popped; every lie I told; every time I scared someone who cared about me,” he says.
During the year he was on Nikita, he says, he was taking as much as 100 mg of OxyContin per day — a high dose. In Los Angeles, Oxy was harder to come by, so he used a cocktail of whatever he could get. That included painkillers such as Percocet, or morphine, or even the attention-deficit-disorder drug Adderall.
After leaving Nikita in 2013, Casey landed his first major starring role in Remedy, which co-starred Flashpoint’s Enrico Colantioni as his physician father. Casey’s character, it turned out, was hooked on OxyContin.
“Luckily, I could act while I was stoned,” Casey says. His anguished, remarkable performance wasn’t far from the truth. But there was an upside to having that hard-earned insight. It rewarded him with a Canadian Screen Award nomination.
At the time, I remember asking him where that performance — the best of his career — came from.
He said there were moments when he was “genuinely in pain” during the shoot. I had no idea what he was alluding to then. “I wasn’t acting much,” he said. “The emotions were there on the surface. It was almost therapeutic and I discovered things about myself.”
But despite starring in his own show and receiving critical accolades, Casey says he wasn’t the easiest person to deal with on set.
“I was spacey, irritable, unreliable and, frankly, angry all the time,” he says.
In between scenes he would disappear from set — a no-no for actors — to get pills. He would push for later call times because he couldn’t get out of bed.
“You’re lying to everyone you know. Plus you have this overwhelming sense of shame and embarrassment,” Casey says. “And it’s all surrounded by this crippling fear of whether you’ll have enough to get through the next few days before you fall apart.”
There was no straight line to the bottom; in the course of his addiction there were several bottoms. His first major emotional pothole happened during the first season of Remedy. His father Richard Casey had a heart attack.
Suddenly, the elder Casey, an Oakville urologist who sparked a love of movies in his son, was being defibrillated in front of him and briefly flatlined in a hospital bed. But his son felt nothing.
“The insane amount of dopamine in my brain clouded any real emotion I should have been feeling,” the younger Casey now recalls. “The situation should have floored me. But yet I was OK with it.”
Two months later on a subway in downtown Toronto the scene flashed before him. The guilt was overwhelming. He burst out crying on a crowded subway car.
It was a rough year. Casey wanted off the drugs but he didn’t know what to do.
“I just couldn’t stop and go through withdrawal. The pace of the show was too fast. I was needed on set 12 hours a day. And I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone either, I was so ashamed at what I had become.”
He had tried to tell his parents. One night he sat in his trailer on set. He typed out his dad’s phone number ready to push the button. He couldn’t. Someone knocked on the door. It was time to shoot a scene.
Later, walking around Dundas Square in downtown Toronto, he called his mother. She picked up. He told her he was depressed and lonely, but couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the addiction.
“I can’t even imagine how worried she must have felt after that conversation,” he says. “I don’t know what stopped me asking for help in those moments — embarrassment, shame, pride — maybe any combination of those emotions.”
The upside of the drugs, he says, is that it got rid of the depression. But it ended up isolating him from his family and friends.
“The thing about drugs is you
think you’re getting away with it and hiding it. But what’s really happening is that people just aren’t saying anything. And I definitely didn’t make it easier.”
Born in Dallas, Casey’s family moved to Oakville when he was a youngster. At the age of 14, the Oakville Trafalgar High School student remembers being at camp and laughed at for telling his bunkmates that he would “never try drugs or alcohol.”
At an early age, he was interested in theatre. His parents enrolled him in theatre camp, which led to starring in school plays.
His first paid gig was an episode of a YTV show called System Crash. He was 15 years old and playing several characters, including Tommy Jensen, “a douchey frat boy.” He was paid $900 — a lot of money for a teen.
He never expected to become a full-time actor. Casey did an undergraduate degree at McGill University in science before finishing a master’s in economics from the University of Toronto, but he still auditioned while at school. He loved comedy and had the vague idea that he wanted to become a standup comic. He says he wasn’t great at economics, but he was smart enough to earn a degree.
He did small roles — commercials and the like — as well as modelling all the way through school, till he landed a starring role in CBC’s MVP.
“It was a time where I could see that I could have a viable career,” he says.
It wasn’t just a viable career. It was a path to stardom. But for Casey, the meltdown on the
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. set was a wake-up call. His character, Will Daniels — an astronaut and burgeoning love interest to one of the series regulars — would be abruptly killed off.
“I got a call later saying ‘we’re going to be letting you go the next episode.’ I just told them I was going through a tough time. And that I was sorry. ‘I don’t blame you for killing me. I’d do the same thing.’ ”
Not long after that experience he found something of an epiphany after walking back to his Los Angeles apartment from a nearby convenience store. “My relationships were strained or destroyed. My career was falling apart, my physical health was poor and my mental health was worse. My finances were rapidly disappearing. I could barely recognize this person I had become,” he says.
“I decided I was done with this life — whatever that meant.”
He took the bottle of morphine he had in his pocket and poured it into a nearby sewer. At his apartment, he flushed any remaining pills he had down the toilet.
He started seeing a counsellor and was put on Suboxone, a medication that staves off withdrawal symptoms. But it was a crutch, not a cure.
“I lost all motivation, fell into depression and checked out of life,” Casey says. “I was experiencing what a lot of recovering addicts experience — an inability to find joy, pleasure or interest in anything.”
Although he continued to work, Casey was struggling. By February of 2018, he was on a cocktail of drugs — Effexor for depression, Gabapentin for anxiety, Vyvanse for ADHD and Suboxone for withdrawal prevention. Things, he says, were getting out of hand.
After a few months of gentle urging from his father, Casey checked himself into a rehab facility.
“When you go to rehab your life changes a lot, while life goes on for the rest of the word,” he would write.
The facility, about an hour’s drive northeast of Toronto was a large, mansion-like home, painted in white. There were about 20 other residents.
There was a pool in the back, closed because of the weather. Casey spent most of his time in the gym. He would run the surrounding hills to burn off anxiety.
“Rehab is a depressing place. I just needed to work out. I was a terrible person to be around while I was on drugs. And I was a terrible person to be around in rehab. Everyone is at their worst.”
He lost more than 15 pounds after two weeks. His anxiety and withdrawal pains meant he had no appetite.
“Opiate withdrawal is hell,” he says. “It starts with the most powerful shot of adrenalin you can imagine. Then it’s anxiety directed at nothing, then cascades into a deep depression, hot and cold flashes, nausea, stomach pain and exhaustion.”
After completing the program in three weeks, he checked out.
“What I needed was for someone to talk away control from me,” he says. He left the facility at the end of September, but didn’t feel completely himself until November of 2018.
Since then, he says he’s been completely clean. He says he hasn’t taken opioids in three years and it’s been several months since he’s touched Suboxone.
“It’s a lot to ask people to trust you again,” Casey says. He is sitting on his couch at his small, messy bachelor apartment in the west end of Toronto. Across the street is a public school where kids are playing basketball.
His two-year old Labrador retriever Rooney is curled up beside him.
“She’s been my therapy dog,” says Casey, stroking Rooney. “Your dog’s looking at you while you’re going through s--t. They need you to be better.”
It’s a wet spring day, and Casey is musing on why the provincial government decided recently to defund several Toronto safeinjection sites.
“I understand why some people may not want those sites in their neighbourhood. I wouldn’t want me in that state in my neighbourhood. But you’re just creating a new problem. Why wouldn’t you want to decrease the chance of a death? I don’t get it. There is a real problem out there. And people need help.”
The first meltdown in Los Angeles didn’t mean the end of Casey’s career. While it cost him a spot on a hit network TV show that could have leapfrogged him to bigger things, he found other parts.
His career rehabilitation started with a Hallmark Christmas movie, not long after he was fired from Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. Hallmark is kind of a retirement community for semi-famous, attractively generic actors, or perhaps famous actors who have seen better days. It’s a gig with a paycheque, not normally a stepping stone to the movie A-list. The company makes dozens of Christmas movies every year. In A Perfect Christmas, released in 2016, Casey plays a guy named Steve who just lost his job and is afraid to tell his wife. His wife, meanwhile, is pregnant and is afraid to tell her husband.
After Hallmark, he had a three-episode run in AMC’s
Turn: Washington’s Spies a period drama as a “lecherous continental officer.”
Then there was a six-episode stint as Detective Blakey in the Toronto-shot Designated Survi
vor with Kiefer Sutherland last year.
His most recent project is Burt Reynolds’ last movie, a comedy called Defining Mo
ments, shot in the Toronto suburb of Unionville and due out later this year.
Most of those projects were done while he was suffering from addiction. But he feels he’s turned a corner. After leaving rehab, he was eager for the first time to reconnect with old friends. He was surprised at their reaction.
“Something inside of me had changed. And I was able to find acceptance in whatever their reaction to me might be,” he says. “But they could not have been more positive. I really just want to apologize to all the people I’ve hurt along the way. All my fears were irrational.”
As a television star, Casey also knows that he has had it better than most.
“I understand I grew up in a great neighbourhood, I went to good schools, I had a great family and I had support. I’m not denying any of that,” he says. “I was definitely one of those guys who didn’t think this could happen to them. If I could give any advice it’s that the first time you have the instinct of telling someone (of your problem), just do it. Don’t be afraid of the outcome. The risk of not telling is worse.”
Casey is something of an anomaly, academically and creatively gifted. Amid all of this, he somehow managed to apply to study law. In 2017 he enrolled in York University, one of the best law schools in Canada.
Casey completed one semester. He’s not sure if he’s going back, although he says the school has been understanding. A letter from the school granting him permission to defer his studies congratulates him “on the success of your efforts to turn your life around.”
It’s a new year, the first one in a long time that he has spent completely clean. He still continues to audition for roles during the crucial pilot season for networks. And he hasn’t had a relapse, although he admits that it’s “all too easy to fall back” into the same destructive habits.
“I’m proud of myself. But I’m angry and shocked at what I was capable of doing,” he says. “There was no lesson learned that I didn’t learn when I was 5 years old and being told not to use drugs.
“I’m physically healed but still have some emotional work to do. It’s hard to put the pieces together. What I do know is that I passed through the eye of a needle. And not everyone gets to do that.”
“There was no lesson learned that I didn’t learn when I was 5 years old.” DILLON CASEY ACTOR