14 Celebrities Who Don’t Drink — Best Life
While plenty of folks like to mix a cocktail or crack open a beer to unwind after a long day, it seems like more and more people are talking about how they’ve chosen to be completely sober—and that includes celebrities. Though we don’t doubt the drinks are flowing at many Hollywood events, many stars have elected to abstain from alcohol altogether, whether that’s because they’ve faced addiction issues, want to avoid the negative impact drinking can have on one’s health, or have simply just never been interested. Read on for 14 celebs who don’t drink—ever—and what they’ve said about why they’re teetotalers.
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Former America’s Next Top Model host Tyra Banks is part of the sober Hollywood contingent—and aside from trying alcohol as a preteen, she’s never been anything but.
“I feel like I’ve been very lucky because I don’t really have an addictive personality,” she wrote in an email to fans, according to a 2011 article from Forbes. “I’ve never had any drugs, and I had a little taste of alcohol when I was 12 years old, but that’s about it.”
After battling alcohol and substance addiction, Elton John decided to get sober when his friend, Ryan White, died of AIDS at 18 years old. On July 29, 1990, he checked himself into rehab, and he’s never looked back. “I am a survivor,” he told Variety in 2019. “I’ve survived a lot of things. Life is full of pitfalls, even when you’re sober. I can deal with them now because I don’t have to run away and hide.”
In 2020, he celebrated 30 years of sobriety, writing in a post on Instagram, “If I hadn’t finally taken the big step of asking for help 30 years ago, I’d be dead. Thank-you from the bottom of my heart to all the people who have inspired and supported me along the way.”
Back in 2002, country music legend Shania Twain told Entertainment Weekly that she doesn’t drink, simply because she has never been “interested” in alcohol—not even when she was younger.
“I’ve never had a drinking problem and never drank when I worked,” Twain said. “I mean, all my teenage years in bars, I never took a drink. I certainly could’ve gone off track many, many times in my youth. Just wasn’t interested.”
Though Jennifer Lopez may pop bottles in her music videos (including the one for “Cambia al Paso,” which came out in 2021), she actually doesn’t reach for alcohol in her real life. And—this ought to inspire some to quit right now—it’s all due to how protective she is of her youthful appearance.
“I don’t drink or smoke or have caffeine,” she told Us Weekly in 2016, via Hollywood Life. “That really wrecks your skin as you get older.”
Now that Anne Hathaway is a mom to two sons, Jonathan and Jack, with husband Adam Schulman, she’s decided to put drinking on hold, at least until her kids are grown up. She told Boston Common Magazine in 2019, that, since “the way [she] drink[s] leads [her] to hangovers,” it can’t happen while she’s trying to parent.
“When I’m at a stage in my life where there is enough space for me to have a hangover, I’ll start drinking again, but that won’t be until my kid is out of the house,” she said, adding, “Most people don’t have to do such an extreme thing. I don’t think drinking is bad. It’s just the way I do it—which I personally think is really fun and awesome—is just not the kind of fun and awesome that goes with having a child for me.”
In a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bradley Cooper shared that he’d given up drugs and alcohol at 29 after he deliberately injured himself at a party to show how “tough” he was and realized that he could “ruin” his life if he wasn’t careful.
“I was so concerned what you thought of me, how I was coming across, how I would survive the day. I always felt like an outsider. I just lived in my head,” he said. “I realized I wasn’t going to live up to my potential, and that scared the hell out of me. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m actually gonna ruin my life; I’m really gonna ruin it.'”
She’s the founder of Betty Buzz, a line of non-alcoholic sodas and mixers, so it’s really no surprise that Blake Lively doesn’t drink herself. (Even though she’s married to Ryan Reynolds, the guy behind Aviation gin.)
“I don’t drink, because I don’t like the effects of alcohol, but I like being a part of it—I like being social, and I like people coming together,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2021 about why she launched the brand.
During a 2013 interview on Chelsea Lately, Jennifer Hudson shocked host Chelsea Handler when they were discussing her role as a heroin addict in The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete and she revealed that she’d never had a drink herself.
“I’ve never done anything, so that was hard to play this role. I’ve never had a drink in my life. I’m sober,” Hudson said on the show (via Us Weekly), later adding, “I’ve never been interested. Nobody ever believes it.”
And Just Like That… star Kristin Davis hasn’t had a drink in over 30 years. As she told James Andrew Miller on his Origins podcast, she was just 22 years old when she went to rehab. She credited her role as Charlotte on Sex and the City for helping her stay sober.
“I didn’t think I would live to be 30. I started drinking very young and luckily I quit very young, before any success happened, thank goodness,” she said. “Because my love for acting was so big when I was very young, I had something that was more important to me than just drinking.”
During a 2021 episode of her Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk, Jada Pinkett Smith admitted that she used to mix “ecstasy, alcohol, [and] weed” on a regular basis, but that all came to a halt when she passed out on the set of 1996’s The Nutty Professor.
“I went to work high and it was a bad batch of ecstasy,” she said. “And I passed out and I told everybody that I must have had old medication in a vitamin bottle. But I’ll tell you what I did, though. I got my [expletive] together and got on that set. That was the last time.”
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Comedian Jim Carrey told 60 Minutes in 2004 that he’s passionate about living an alcohol-free life—and almost never consumes caffeine, either.
“I rarely drink coffee. I’m very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful,” the star said.
Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire has been alcohol free since before he entered his twenties. He told Men’s Journal in 2007 (via CBS News) that he credits Alcoholics Anonymous with helping him through his sobriety journey, and it doesn’t seem like anything has changed in the years since.
“I stopped consuming any mind-altering substances when I was 19 years old. And I’ve been abstinent since then.” he told The Guardian in 2013.
Daniel Radcliffe became a star overnight playing the title role in the Harry Potter franchise, and the series was such a major part of his young life that its impending conclusion—and the fear of what lied beyond it—led to some heavy drinking. But in 2010, he got sober and has stayed that way since.
“A lot of drinking that happened towards the end of Potter and for a little bit after it finished, it was panic, a little bit not knowing what to do next—not being comfortable enough in who I was to remain sober,” he said in a 2020 interview on BBC Radio 4, as reported by The Independent.
In her memoir, Open Book, singer and designer Jessica Simpson revealed that her loved ones staged an intervention for her after she picked up a habit of drinking every day, including around her children. It worked, and in November 2021, she celebrated four years of sobriety in an Instagram post. Simpson shared a photo of herself the morning she committed to giving up drinking.
“There is so much stigma around the word alcoholism or the label of an alcoholic. The real work that needed to be done in my life was to actually accept failure, pain, brokenness, and self sabotage,” she wrote. “The drinking wasn’t the issue. I was. I didn’t love myself. I didn’t respect my own power. Today I do.”
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