An actor who's appeared in some of Hollywood's biggest movies recently opened up about the "enormous amount of guilt" he felt after his little brother's tragic death
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Paul Bettany was just 16 when his younger brother, Matthew, died after he fell from the roof of a school in Hertfordshire, England. Matthew was only 8 years old. Bettany's father worked at the school as a drama teacher, and their family lived on the school grounds at the time.
The 55-year-old VisionQuest star admitted he felt partly responsible for the tragedy, as he taught his younger brother how to climb the building.
"My brother died when he was eight. And that was bad. I guess that's part of the reason I ended up on the streets busking," Bettany said on the Sibling Revelry podcast earlier this week.
"It was really incredibly hard," the A Knight's Tale actor continued. "He fell off, I guess he was playing hide-and-seek, and he fell off a building that I had taught him how to climb. So there was an enormous amount of guilt to work through on that."
Hollywood Actor Found Himself on the Streets Following Brother's Death
After the tragedy, he eventually found himself on the streets, playing his guitar for tips from passersby.
"I thought I should have stuck close to him... been there for him... but I wasn't," he added. The Hollywood star admitted that he sometimes used the tragedy as an excuse to delve into substance abuse, too.
"Yes, and I have spent a lifetime just running the bad memories so I could justify my behavior, and use those bad memories as the reason for any time that I struggled," he told The Times.
"I think that everybody [gets] dropped into a maze by their childhood. And the job of growing up is trying to find your way out of that maze. And I did," he added on the Sibling Revelry podcast.
Paul Bettany Credits Therapy For Helping Him Get Past His Decades Long Guilt
Bettany, who eventually found his footing and starred in Hollywood blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code and Captain America: Civil War, eventually worked through his guilt with therapy.
"It took some doing and a lot of time, you know, a lot of therapy," he detailed. "The thing about therapy is, you really want to go when you're in crisis; you really want to show up. But when you're not in crisis, it's hard to motivate yourself to go.
"But those are where the big revelations happened for me. When I was in crisis, I was just too busy trying to stay on the earth."
"When you have a big moment of trauma, it's very easy to hang every issue or every problem that you perceive that you have on this one moment where you feel like it was life before Matthew died and life after Matthew died," he explained.
"And it's only moments of calm when you're really able to sort of unpick it and kind of go, huh, that wasn't about that at all. That was about this other thing."
