She began her career at the age of seven and became a child superstar thanks to her work on the Nickelodeon network. As she grew up, drugs and her mental health played against her and a legal guardianship was imposed on her: facial tattoos, controversial tweets and rap, such is the life of this "broken toy".
When Amanda Laura Bynes was seven years old, she appeared on television for the first time: it was a simple commercial for a chocolate brand in which she had a minor role, but that girl with a sweet face and light brown hair was about to conquer the audience. with his enormous charisma and his easygoing and comical personality.
Like many other child stars, the native of California managed to make the leap from commercials to television and in 1996 she joined the famous program created by the controversial Dan Schneider, who was singled out in the media for "inappropriate behavior" during the movement ' Me too', All that, known in Latin America as Todo eso.
The Amanda Show: The Golden Age of Children's Comedy
Despite the fact that when Amanda became part of the program, the sitcom had already been on the air for a few years, the public adored her on screen and she soon became her own character “Ashley”, a girl who received mail and gave advice from the most bizarre way possible. During the first episode, she was described as a "too happy and cheerful" child. Nothing was truer then.
In October 1999, Amanda got her own space: The Amanda Show, a spin-off of the sitcom where she debuted that aired Monday through Saturday for just over three years.
The program apparently did not have a narrative logic, it was just about a group of children, including Josh Peck and Drake Bell, who years later would be part of the famous television show Drake and Josh, who changed the contents of television for things that they wanted to see with funny skits.
About his work on this program with Amada Bynes, Drake Bell recalled in an interview with E! Entertainment in 2019: "My memory of working with Amanda Bynes is incredible (...) She was a star, but I could see her work ethic there," he said. During her participation in that program, Amanda acted like a professional, according to the singer, despite being only 14 years old.
Amanda's show ended in September 2002, as her protagonist had new plans on television, although she would still work hand in hand with Schneider, who produced her next program: My Sister's Pranks, where she acted alongside Jennie Garth and Welsey. Johanthan.
Thus, role by role, Amanda became a benchmark in children's comedy, winning up to five Kids Choice Awards, and soon debuted on the big screen in titles such as What a girl wants or Big Fat Liar with the star. of Malcolm in the middle, Frankie Muniz.
She also shared the cover of Vanity Fair with some of the most successful teens of the day, like Hilary Duff and the Olsen twins. Over time, Bynes made the dizzying leap: from a funny girl to a s-xual icon. And it was there, perhaps, where the problems began.
“The New Diet Pill”: An Unlucky S-x Icon
As Amanda narrated many years later in an interview with Paper magazine, the decline in her career began in 2006, when the film A Girl in Distress was released, where she played Viola, a teenager who pretends to be her brother and who falls in love with his teammate on the football team -played by Channing Tatum-.
The actress did not like how she looked on screen. She was 20 years old and that role had affected her perception of herself: "When the movie was released and I saw it, I fell into a deep depression for four or six months because I didn't like how I looked as a man," she told the publication in 2018, an interview that intended to return her to public life after four years of not giving clues.
Seeing herself with short hair and sideburns was “a weird, out-of-body experience. It really put me down,” she explained. Despite this, Amanda managed to recover, momentarily, and she worked in the 2007 production of Hairspray, alongside John Travolta and Zac Efron.
Amanda described that production as “the best of her life”. However, around those years, she began to be susceptible to changes in her body and to worry about her weight. Suddenly, in a magazine she read an article about a "new diet pill." It was Adderall, an amphetamine commonly used to treat Attention Disorder (ADD).
Immediately, she told the magazine, she faked the symptoms of the syndrome and managed to get the pill. Her experience with drugs began when she was just 16 years old, around the time she was ending her transition from the Amanda Show to the big screen. At that time she only smoked marijuana, giving way to more "hard" substances.
But none affected her system as much as the “diet pill” that little by little was affecting her system. In 2010, Amanda graced the cover of the men's magazine Maxim. They sold the post as "Amanda Bynes, Grown Up and Uncovered." She had become quite a s-xual icon of the decade, although her personal life was in decline.
The two movies she worked on afterward were flops for her: She gave up the Hall Pass tape, which was made the same year the magazine came out, because she was too stoned to memorize its lines: "I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew Adderall because I thought they hit me faster. I remember chewing a handful of them and not being able to concentrate on what I had to say or memorize my lines, "he told the same publication.
The same thing happened in the film Rumors and Lies, a film that featured the main performance of Emma Stone: “I couldn't stand my appearance in that film and I didn't like my performance. I was convinced that I had to stop acting after I saw it. She was high on marijuana when I saw her, but for some reason she began to affect me deeply. I don't know if it was a plant-derived psychosis, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It changed my perception of things,” she narrated.
That prompted Amanda to announce her withdrawal from acting through her Twitter account, a decision that she then seemed final. What came next was even more sinister for the actress: she had a lot of free time on her hands and began abusing drugs and isolating herself in her apartment: "I was stuck at home, taking drugs, watching TV and tweeting," she said.
The arrests and the wig: a legal guardianship
At that stage, Amanda turned social networks upside down on more than one occasion because of her tweets, where she wrote to Drake to "murder her vagina" and antagonized Rihanna. Although later she showed regret for what happened, what she wrote ended a good part of what she built in her career, at least that's how she considered it.
When she was 27, in 2013, everything was destruction for the actress and after setting fire to the garage entrance of a house in Los Angeles and being arrested on previous occasions for vehicular incidents and drug possession, Bynes was booked into a psychiatric institute. At the trial where this measure was issued, she went with a highly tangled platinum blonde wig.
Those were the darkest days for the actress and the scandals led to the imposition of legal guardianship by her parents, who declared that she was mentally unstable. The same that continues to this day and that recently transpired that it would last until 2023.
Although, later, Amanda's lawyer clarified to People magazine that she does not have an end date, but rather it extends day by day and that it will end when it ceases to be the "best option for her".
After being discharged, Amanda constantly said that she was doing better, although she moved away from the artistic medium. It was not until 2018 that she reappeared. In that year, she offered an interview to Paper to clarify what she had gone through in the years prior to her internment and the guardianship that her parents have, she also announced that she was studying design, a dream that she had had since I was a child.
However, it was not enough, he soon posted a message on his social networks to explain that he needed space. At the end of 2020, the actress reappeared with a radical change of look.
She would have made a facial tattoo in the shape of a heart and she decided to dye her hair black. Later, she announced that she would marry her fiancé, Paul Michel, with whom she currently lives in Los Angeles, California.
Now, according to one of the many Instagram accounts where she shares content, she has explored other disciplines such as rap and, according to various media outlets, she remains sober. However, it would be difficult to remove the marks that she left her transit through Hollywood. Every day is a struggle for this child star who gave up on fame, even if the show hasn't given up on her yet.
