Nick Stahl, a former child star and Hollywood heartthrob, said he was never homeless but spent “time on the street voluntarily” during his decades-long battle with addiction to drugs and alcohol. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor—known for films like Terminator 3 and The Man Without a Face—explained that his time on the street came at a point when he was doing drugs while living in a sober house. A media frenzy sprang to life in the aftermath of a missing-persons report filed by Stahl’s then-wife in 2012, reporting he had been living on Skid Row. “That wasn’t the case, thankfully,” Stahl said, who has been clean for four years.

“It was a worst-case scenario,” Stahl’s friend and writer-director Jacob Tierney said of the time. “I was waiting for a call that he’s dead.” Stahl also revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he “was pretty much hung over for every single day of work that I ever did—as a kid, in my early 20s, through all the films.” The actor, who worked steadily through the early 2000s, stepped away from Hollywood in 2012. He spent the next five years “really diving into my recovery,” he said, working for a friend’s moving company and in a New York coffee shop. Fans would occasionally recognize him, which was “surprisingly empowering… and it was necessary.”