He’s lived in a penthouse on Park Avenue (or, at least, his character Willis Jackson did on his long-running hit sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes) and clawed his way out of the depths of drug addiction. For Todd Bridges, life has been a wild series of peaks and valleys, and it all started with acting.
“I definitely wanted to be in show business when I was five years old,” Bridges recalled. I wanted to be Redd Foxx, my idol. My mom always told us that we can do whatever we wanted to do, but once we started, we couldn’t quit. That’s the only thing she would tell us.”
Born into a family of entertainers, Bridges started young, quickly earning groundbreaking roles on TV classics like The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, becoming the first African-American child actor to have a recurring role on a popular TV show. For the world, these were game-changing moments. For Bridges, it was business as usual.
“I don’t think I had felt that much about it because I just thought it was just a job until much later in my life when I got older and I realized how significant these things were,” Bridges explained. “Even when I was in Roots, It was years before I realized how big that was. That was one of the biggest miniseries in history. I think it captured 77 million viewers. Still to this very day, I don’t think anything has ever done that.”
Then came another life-changer: Diff’rent Strokes, an eight-year sitcom sensation that achieved huge ratings success and plenty of cast drama to go with it. Much like costars Gary Coleman and Dana Plato, Bridges struggled through his own real-life challenges in the years following the show’s departure from prime-time airwaves, battling addiction and running afoul of the law on multiple occasions. These struggles are often generalized as common issues amongst former child actors, a theory that Bridges doesn’t buy into.
“I don’t ever blame the industry. I always tell people that for every one actor they named that has had problems or gotten in trouble, I can name 20 that haven’t,” he said. “So that’s just what the media does. It’s not true at all. We were painted as demons, and we were good kids. We just went through some difficult situations that we didn’t know how to process. And when it was processed, it was processed in the public, not by yourself.”
Still, the impact of the Diff’rent Strokes cast’s collective struggles weighs heavily upon Bridges, the lone surviving member of the group.
“I was the one that was the go-between for everybody. I maintained relationships with everybody,” Bridges recalled. “Then we lost everybody — Dana and Gary and Conrad [Bain] and Charlotte [Rae]. No one ever thought I’d be the lone survivor, so that’s pretty traumatic.”
In 1993, after years of battling bouts of addiction to crack cocaine and methamphetamines (in addition to numerous legal charges related to drug possession and sales), Bridges made the decision to get clean and rehabilitate his life.
“It was the old saying in our program — ‘you got to get sick and tired of being sick and tired’ — and I was tired of doing the same thing over again, expecting different results,” Bridges admitted. “I finally realized that something had to change. The judge helped me find a program, and I was able to make a change in my life. I was able to start realizing that I could be happy if I just worked the program and became more confident within myself.”
“I’m kind of used to the world having access to my life anyway, so it was just another step to clear my own mind,” Bridges chuckled. “My program’s all about me staying out of trouble and knowing how to keep my life in a good light.”
A desire to pay it forward and help others has led to Dang!, the new podcast that Bridges cohosts with his wife Bettijo. Together, the happy couple chat about “life’s messy realities — everything from love and family to mental health struggles like anxiety and addiction.”
“We just thought that we should do a podcast, so we could just talk about issues like what’s it like to be in a mixed relationship, or what it’s like to have stepchildren — how difficult it can be and how great it can be at the same time, or maybe a little bit of both,” Bridges laughed. “People really have been enjoying it a lot, which is good. I have a good outlook on life to share, being a person who’s gone through so much. To see the world clearly and not have any hate in my heart is a big step, and I think people need to see that. You don’t have to go around hating people. You just love yourself and everyone around you. You keep peaceful, loving people around you and your life will get a lot better.”
