Cheryl Burke and Matthew Lawrence got candid this week about her alcohol struggles, which led to their split in 2008.
They eventually rekindled their romance nine years later, and in 2018 upon their engagement Cheryl went on the wagon.
On her podcast Pretty Messed Up with AJ McLean and Rene Elizondo, Cheryl, 36, said that Matthew ‘has seen me, you guys, at my worst’ during her drinking days.
Side by side: Cheryl Burke and Matthew Lawrence got candid this week about her alcohol struggles, which led to their split in 2008; they are pictured in 2018
Cheryl explained that she could see evidence of her partying while watching herself on old seasons of Dancing With The Stars.
‘Oh, I could totally tell, every season, I was like: “Ope, I got wasted the night before that season!”‘ she shared gamely.
Meanwhile Matthew ‘didn’t drink,’ ‘didn’t smoke’ and ‘didn’t try anything’ until a three-month film shoot in Canada and Australia when he was 20.
At that point ‘I tried everything for the first time’ and ‘had a huge freakout about it. I’ll never, yeah, I thought, you know, I was gonna, you know, die, or I was gonna, you know, I don’t know – I called my mom crying, you know, the whole thing, you know, after that whole experience, you know.’
As seen in 2007: On her podcast Pretty Messed Up with AJ McLean and Rene Elizondo, Cheryl, 36, said that Matthew ‘has seen me, you guys, at my worst’ during her drinking days
When pressed for specifics he said he tried ‘the gamut,’ saying that it was ‘a lot’ and ‘more than I care to speak about.’
After he returned home he was going out with a friend every Wednesday, until as Cheryl said: ‘But then he met me and then it was seven nights a week.’
They became a duo in 2007 and the following year the romance fell apart after Cheryl’s hard living ‘just kept getting worse,’ Matthew said.
He remembered: ‘It was now four, five in the morning she was coming home. It was just too much. And so yeah, I ended it.’
Kicking up her heels: They became a duo in 2007 and the following year the romance fell apart after Cheryl’s hard living ‘just kept getting worse,’ Matthew said; pictured in 2007
After their reconciliation in 2017 and got engaged in 2018 and she revealed that she ‘felt like crap about myself’ after having a shot at their engagement party.
Cheryl, whose alcoholic father had recently died, had ‘started breaking out into hives like all of a sudden,’ as ‘her body was reacting, not reacting well to the alcohol at all. I started feeling like I was burning from the inside out.’
Her experience after that shot ‘really scared the crap out of me,’ and she promptly gave up drinking which she has not resumed since.
She went public with her sobriety last month on the Lady Gang podcast, revealing that she has stuck it out herself without attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
The end: After their reconciliation in 2017 and got engaged in 2018 and she revealed that she ‘felt like crap about myself’ after having a shot at their engagement party; pictured in 2018
Meanwhile Matthew has given up marijuana since ‘I was smoking a lot,’ but can have the occasional drink in front of Cheryl who said that ‘it’s totally fine’ and ‘I don’t crave it. It’s almost like I got like hypnotized or something. I feel like my brain got rewired.’
‘If I thought that it was gonna be in any way, shape or form seductive or, you know, trying to pull Cheryl back in with having a drink or something, I wouldn’t do it,’ said Matthew. ‘But honestly, Cheryl’s pretty darn concrete with her just non-interest in drinking. However, that said, I can’t remember the last time I had a drink.’
Cheryl said that ‘we’ll have like your family over and you’ll have like a beer or whatever’ in which case ‘I’ll get beers for everybody.’
She and Matthew eventually tied the knot last spring in San Diego, where his best man was his older brother Joey, who had introduced the happy couple.