Why Do Celebs – Such as Tom Holland, John Mayer and Cara Delevingne – Choose to Quit Drinking?

Red-carpet events… award shows… after-parties… The life of a celebrity can seem wonderfully glamorous – and, indeed, booze-soaked. Such events are often accompanied by alcohol, which has historically been portrayed as a symbol of celebration, social status and achievement. Toasting an Oscar/Grammy win with a bottle – or four – of Dom Pérignon is surely the ultimate indicator of success. Right?   

But what happens when the party’s over, they’ve kicked off their Louboutins and they find themselves reaching for the aspirin – or, worse, another drink? Many celebrities have taken stock of their relationship with alcohol and decided: “Enough!”

As with us ‘normal folk’, each A-lister’s journey to sobriety is their own, with varying reasons for choosing to follow the teetotal track. These stars explain why they’ve called time at the bar, and why it’s the best thing they’ve ever done.       

“I was enslaved to drink” – Tom Holland

When Spider-Man actor Tom Holland embarked on Dry January in 2022, all he could think about was having a drink. He became worried that he had a problem with alcohol, so decided to test himself through February, too. During Jay Shetty’s podcast On Purpose, Holland recalls that he was “really struggling” and felt like he couldn’t be sociable without a drink in his hand. This scared him. So he made the decision to remain sober for six months, until his birthday on June 1st. 

“By the time I had got to June 1st, I was the happiest I have ever been in my life,” he says. He could sleep better, handle problems better, take things in his stride better. His mental clarity improved; he felt fitter and healthier. “I can’t believe the difference I feel from not drinking,” he enthuses. 

One of the huge benefits he’s felt from putting down the bottle is sleep. When he was drinking, despite working 14 hours a day and hitting the gym for two hours a day, sleep eluded him. Now that he’s given up drinking, he sleeps soundly. And loves that he’s fresh as a daisy at 8am when he hits the golf course with his bleary-eyed friends. “I’m over the moon to be sober,” he states.   

“I had a six-day hangover” – John Mayer

Nearly a week after celebrating rapper Drake’s 30th birthday in 2016, John Mayer was still feeling the ill-effects. The singer/songwriter recalls how he’d “made quite a fool of [himself]”, and vowed to lay off the sauce. But his motivation to stop drinking wasn’t just about avoiding embarrassing himself or feeling rotten for days on end after a bender. It was also about fulfilling his potential. 

Mayer came to the realization that, whilst drinking, he wasn’t giving things 100% – and that wasn’t OK. “That next year, I did four tours, I was in two bands, I was happy on airplanes,” he explains. He toured with Grateful Dead spinoff band Dead & Company and released his seventh album in 2017. 

More recently, in 2023, he took to social media to extol the joys of sobriety, saying during his Instagram Live show Current Mood, “I just want to be an example of somebody who said, ‘That’s enough’.” He explains that he climbed out of the “hamster wheel” of drinking and encourages others to do the same if they feel they want to. 

Mayer likens drinking to being kidnapped, saying that if you’re doing Sober October, you might want to think about continuing down the path of abstinence: “Look at it like this: your kidnapper sent you to the store with some money and you’re free. You don’t have to come back to the house of the kidnapper to bring the loaf of bread and the change. You just keep running.”

“The way I was living was not sustainable” – Cara Delevingne

Having got drunk for the first time at the age of seven (“I’d gone around nailing glasses of Champagne [at a family wedding]”), Cara Delevingne’s relationship with alcohol (and drugs) shifted shortly after her 30th birthday. Photographs of her looking jittery, bedraggled and shoeless were splashed across the tabloids and internet, which served as a wake-up call to the British model and actress. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun,” she says in a 2023 Vogue interview, “but at some point it was, like, ‘Okay, I don’t look well’.” 

Having been a party girl since her teens, Delevingne admits that she used booze to escape the painful parts of her life and change her reality, if only temporarily: “I just didn’t want to deal with my issues.” One of these issues is the alcoholism her mother faced. “The way that addiction took my mother from me was brutal, and it was brutal for her too,” she reflects.   

Checking herself into rehab in late 2022, Delevingne knew she was in a bad place and needed help. She embarked on the 12-step program, recognizing that her previous ‘quick-fix’ retreats and courses weren’t cutting it. She knew she needed to address the “nitty-gritty deeper stuff” if she was ever going to be well and sober. She understands that her road to recovery will continue to have its ups and downs, and that she needs to consistently put in the work. But she’s committed. And she’s happy that sobriety has made her “calmer” and “stiller”.

“It was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow” – Anne Hathaway

During an interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2019, Anne Hathaway told the talk-show host that she was giving up alcohol for a very specific 18 years. She recalls being hungover on the school run with her then-two-year-old son and cites this as a catalyst for her decision. “I’m going to stop drinking while my son is in my house just because I don’t totally love the way I do it and he’s getting to an age where he really does need me all the time in the mornings.”

Whilst Hathaway’s actual drinking wasn’t a problem, the aftermath of nights out were, so she came to the conclusion that alcohol wasn’t for her. “If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.”

In a subsequent interview on the UK’s Lorraine show, the actress joked, “I’m going to raise a proper, good human being, get him off to college, then move to a vineyard and spend the back-half of my life completely sloshed.” In the meantime, though, she declares, “My personal experience with [giving up alcohol] is that everything is better.”

“I was trying to escape and numb myself” – Michael Phelps

Although swimmer Michael Phelps has achieved phenomenal professional success – being the most-decorated athlete in Olympic history – his mental-health struggles resulted in him “not wanting to be alive” in 2014. This feeling came after his second DUI, which caused USA Swimming to suspend him for six months. He describes this time of deep depression as the “bottom of my bottom”.

He entered a six-week stint in rehab, where he was forced to face up to his problems. Previously, he’d been using alcohol as an escape route: “[I spent] years and years and years of just shoving every negative, bad feeling down to the point where I just didn’t even feel it anymore.” Rehab not only saved his life, it also forced him to face up to issues from childhood surrounding his father, which was a huge step towards a happier existence. 

There is no alcohol in Phelps’s life now, and he has become an advocate for addiction recovery and mental-health awareness. In May 2024 – during Mental Health Awareness Month – he spoke about his “post-Olympic depression” in a ‘Meet the Moment’ interview on NBC News, saying that he had to learn that vulnerability is a good thing, rather than a weakness. “It was scary at first, but vulnerability just means change. And for me, it was a great change.”

“I was willing to go to this crazy, dark place every time” – Lucy Hale

Pretty Little Liars actress Lucy Hale recognizes now that she’s had a problem with alcohol since she was 14, the first time she drank, declaring that she was a “textbook binge-drinker”. Between the ages of 20 and 32, she tried to get a handle on it – attempting to change for her mom, for her boyfriends, for her career, for vain reasons (“I’ll look younger and be skinnier [if I stop drinking]”), to no avail. Even when one of her best friends died due to alcoholism, she continued to party hard. 

But after hitting rock bottom, she committed to her decision to get sober, revealing in the podcast The Diary of a CEO in February, 2023, that she finally thought: “I deserve more out of this life.” She knows that if she’d continued on her self-destructive path, she would have lost everything she cares about. In the podcast, she reflects on why she turned to alcohol in the first place, stating, “Alcohol isn’t the problem. The problem is this feeling inside of me.” She believed that when she drank, she became the “real Lucy” – a funnier, cooler, freer version of herself. Which she realizes now was “all bullsh*t”. She also acknowledges that alcohol “quieted [her] mind”, which she was unable to shut off from racing thoughts without drinking.   

Now, though, instead of drowning her thoughts in booze, she tries to remain as present as possible – and has stopped trying to please everyone. “I love that I am just showing up as myself and not having to paint a pretty picture of what people expect me to be or expect me to say,” she says. She told Drew Barrymore on her talk show that she “gave a new definition to fun” and feels safe in her body again. “I wouldn’t give this feeling up for anything.”

“It really, really affects my relationships” – Miley Cyrus

Singer Miley Cyrus’s sobriety was prompted by vocal cord surgery that she underwent towards the end of 2019. Whilst she was recovering and without a voice, she pondered her relationship with alcohol and realized that it severely impacted her relationships with loved ones. When drinking, “I’m not the best partner; I’m not the best daughter; I’m not the best sister. I can be a little unreliable,” she reveals.

She acknowledges that, whilst she doesn’t consider herself an alcoholic, alcohol is a problem for her because it means she’s not at her best. “It makes me not reach my full potential, which is unacceptable to me. I will not accept anyone or anything that causes me to not reach my fullest potential.” 

During Variety’s Big Ticket podcast, Cyrus points out that being sober when you’re young can bring the stigma that people will think you’re no fun. But she countered this belief with, “Honey, you can call me a lot of things, but I know that I’m fun!” She’s feeling energized now that she’s off the booze: “The thing that I love about it is waking up 100%, 100% of the time. I don’t want to wake up feeling groggy. I want to wake up feeling ready.”

Qualify For Treatment