Wentworth Miller — who came out in a letter to St. Petersburg International Film Festival last month – talked about trying to kill himself as a teenager during a moving speech at the Human Rights Campaign gala in Seattle on Saturday night.
In videos posted on TMZ, Miller, 41, spoke of dealing with his sexuality as an adolescent and how much it tortured him.
“Growing up I was a target,” he said. “Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test and there were a thousand ways to fail. A thousand ways to portray yourself to not live up to someone else’s standards of what was accepted or what was normal.”
The struggle was so much, that the former “Prison Break” star tried to kill himself multiple times, starting when he was 15.
“I waited until my family went away for the weekend and I was alone in the house and I swallowed a bottle of pills,” he said. “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.”
While he eventually came out to family and friends, he was afraid of how being openly gay would affect his career.
“I chose to lie — 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,” he said.
Last month, after having been invited to appear at the St. Petersburg International Film Festival, Miller finally came out publicly. In a letter declining the organizer’s invitation, the actor said he would not be appearing at the festival because of the Russian government’s treatment of gay men and women.
“The situation is in no way acceptable, and I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly,” he wrote in the letter, which has since been posted on GLAAD’s Web site.