Actor Wentworth Miller, who revealed last month that he’s gay, said he tried to commit suicide “more than once” when he was growing up as he struggled to come to terms with his sexual orientation.
Speaking at the Human’s Right Campaign Dinner in Seattle on Saturday, Miller, 41, said his first suicide attempt happened when he was 15 years old, reported Us Weekly.
“The first time I tried to kill myself I was 15. I waited until my family went away for the family and I was alone in the house and I swallowed a bottle of pills,” he revealed to a large audience. “I don’t remember what happened over the next couple of days but I’m pretty sure come Monday morning I was on the bus back to school pretending everything was fine.”
“Growing up I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test and there was a thousand ways to fail,” said Miller. “A thousand ways to portray yourself to not live up to someone else’s standards of what was accepted.”
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The former “Prison Break” star also said he hid his homosexuality from the public for a long time because he feared it would harm his acting career.
“I had multiple opportunities to speak my truth, which is that I was gay, but I chose not to. I was out privately to family and friends. Publicly, I was not,” he told the audience.
“When I thought about the possibility of coming out, how that might impact me and the career I worked so hard for, I was filled with fear.”
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“As a gay man, I must decline,” he wrote to the organizers of the St. Petersburg International Film Festival. “I am deeply troubled by the current attitude toward and treatment of gay men and women by the Russian government.
In coming out, Miller wrote that he could not participate in a celebration hosted by a country “where people like myself are being systemically denied their basic right to live and love openly.”
