Tom Felton narrates dinking away his 20s amid substance abuse

Tom Felton wore his heart on his sleeve and opened up about how he turned to alcohol to "escape" his 20s which led his then-girlfriend to stage an intervention.

In his memoir Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, the actor admitted that he struggled with mental health issues that that alcohol abuse was just a "symptom" of his "deeper" struggles as he recalled regularly drinking excessively before going to rehab thrice.

It eventually escalated to the point that his manager, then-girlfriend, and agents had to stage an intervention to urge him to get help.

The most moving scenario however was when his lawyer who he "barely met face to face" gave him a poignant warning that "hit him the hardest".

'"Tom," he said, "I don't know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I've been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don't be the twelfth".'

"The alcohol, though, wasn't the problem. It was the symptom. The problem was deeper. 

"I went from being not particularly interested to regularly having a few pints a day before the sun had even gone down, and a shot of whiskey to go with each of them

"I am no longer shy of putting my hands up and saying: I'm not okay. I am not alone in having these feelings.

"Just as we all experience physical ill-health at some stage in our lives, so we all experience mental ill-health too. There's no shame in that. It's not a sign of weakness."