Henry Winkler would not be the award-winning actor he is today without therapy.
The "Happy Days" alumnus, 80, was candid about the poor state of his mental health before beginning talk therapy around age 70 while speaking on "In Depth with Graham Bensinger."
"I was out of balance. I was out of my ... mind," he said in the interview, released Sept. 9. After more than a decade of therapy, he thinks he's "getting there" in terms of making improvements he deems necessary.
Before therapy, whose virtues Winkler has extolled in recent years, including in his 2023 memoir, the Golden Globe winner was "pretty good at either figuring things out or smoothing things out in my mind or rationalizing, and I just couldn't do it anymore."
He found himself "treading
water" and "going sideways," he told Bensinger. Compartmentalizing no longer worked for him, and the "Arrested Development" actor realized: "I needed to now empty myself out of all of the rancid garbage I had allowed to infiltrate [my mind]."
According to Winkler, he "didn't let anyone in," even his wife of nearly 50 years, Stacey Weitzman. But he made an exception for his pets and three children, Jed, Zoe and Max, with whom he made a point of practicing active listening.
Without therapy, there would be no 'Barry' for Henry Winkler
For Winkler, a key takeaway from therapy has been the skill of being present.
"[Therapy] allowed me to feel and breathe, see and hear, be in the moment," which helped him become "a much better actor," he said. Portraying Bill Hader's acting teacher Gene Cousineau in "Barry," a role that earned Winkler his first Primetime Emmy, would not have been possible without dealing with his mental health.
"I didn't have a connection to the depth," he said. "I had to get so much junk [out]."
Using a metaphor he's previously employed in interviews, Winkler compared himself to Swiss cheese – "filled with holes" that he's "anxious about stepping in" – with the goal of becoming "a chunk of cheddar, not a hole in sight." He continues this work with his doctor, whom he says he owes a gift "the size of a skyscraper."
"I thank the universe, I thank God, every day that I met her," he said.
Winkler previously explained on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" in 2023 that he'd had a "rocky" home life as a child, and being cast as the Fonz in his late 20s "unleashed my imagination and my emotion." But instead of embracing his childhood, he "Chernobyl-ed it with that thickness of cement" and "never got connected to the core of me."
Then he started talk therapy, and his doctor "led me ... to become who I might be."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Henry Winkler was 'out of my mind' before starting therapy at 70
