39 Sober Celebrities Who Say Quitting Alcohol Changed Their Lives

Anne Hathaway revealed why she made the personal decision to give up alcohol in a candid interview with Vanity Fair. “I knew deep down it wasn’t for me. And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none?’ But none. If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.”

The Devil Wears Prada star wanted to be clear that “it’s a path everybody has to walk for themselves.”

“My personal experience with it is that everything is better. For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow. The thing that I have faith in is that everybody else is going to have one or two drinks, and by the time everybody gets to two drinks, you’ll feel like you’ve had two drinks—but without the hangover,” she added.

While the Euphoria star may portray a troubled character, Rue, who is struggling with substance abuse issues, Zendaya herself has made it clear she has no interest in alcohol. Posting on her 21st birthday, the actor said, “Today I turn 21! Just because I’m now the legal drinking age, doesn’t mean I’m going to start throwing ’em back. I don’t plan to start drinking.”

Zendaya added that her life is “too stressful to need help with relaxing by having a cocktail. This industry is way too nuts for me to not be in control of myself and my decisions, so I just don’t want to introduce drinking! Plus, I don’t want drinking to become a vice. Why try something if you don't need it?!”

Zendaya’s fiancé and Spider-Man co-star, Tom Holland, also leads a sober lifestyle (and founded a non-alcoholic beer brand, Bero). Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in May 2023, the actor said that he had been sober for over a year. He later, while appearing on Jay Shetty's On Purpose podcast, revealed that the reason he decided to get sober was because he was “definitely addicted to alcohol.”

“I didn’t one day wake up and say, ‘I’m giving up drinking.’ I just – like many Brits – had had a very, very boozy December. Christmas time, I was on vacation, I was drinking a lot,” Tom explained. “I decided to just give up for January... and all I could think about was having a drink. It was all I could think about. I was waking up thinking about it, I was checking the clock... and it just really scared me.”

After this, he decided to challenge himself to two months being alcohol-free. “If I can do two months off, then I can prove to myself that I don't have a problem,” he recalled. However, Tom admitted that after two months, he was still “really struggling” and that it was a challenge for him to attend work and social events and not have a drink. So, he decided to try and stay sober until his birthday, June 6. When the date came up, Tom revealed that it was the “happiest he’d ever been” in his life and that he’s decided to keep his alcohol-free outlook up.

Miley’s been sober for a while now, but in June 2024, she gave more insight into her decision to ditch drinking. “My lifestyle is extremely clean. Sobriety is a big part of it,” she told W Magazine before revealing she works out in Gucci heels. “My mantra is, like any athlete, ‘Practice how you perform.’ So that’s why I practice in my heels.”

Sharing that there's a history of addiction in her family, Miley said in 2020 that she had been sober for six months, which was also prompted by needing to have vocal surgery.

“I’ve been sober, sober for the past six months. At the beginning, it was just about this vocal surgery... It’s really hard, especially being young, there’s that stigma of 'you’re no fun' but it’s like, ‘Honey, you can call me a lot of things, but I know that I’m fun.’”

She added that she doesn't miss hangovers either. “I don’t want to wake up feeling groggy. I want to wake up feeling ready.”

The Iron Claw actor spoke about his choice to go sober back in 2016 – when asked by ELLE how sobriety has changed his life, the star replied, “What I found is structure. That led me to a balance of opposites: You get out of life what you put in. There was a moment when my morning routine was, like, get up and Google yourself. But that stopped, dramatically and instantly, probably three years ago.”

He continued, “I realized that viewing yourself through other people’s pictures is not living your own life. I wasn’t really being myself. A lot of my hobbies had gone out the window. I couldn’t skateboard or surf for fear of being followed. Crossing the line of fear is what leads to greatness.”

The actor initially kept her choice to abstain from alcohol a secret, only choosing to share it with the world after she’d been sober for two years (despite having previously been open about the substance abuse issues she faced as a teenager) – which is absolutely fair enough.

Speaking to TV host Gayle King, Drew admitted that she was previously stuck in a bad cycle, saying, “When you are stuck in a pattern, or if you are going through things and you not only admit them out loud, but you force yourself to say, ‘I’m willing to make big changes’... I think we all think we’re very weak when we don’t make those changes.”

She added that she kept her sober journey a secret until it was one she’d built enough confidence in on a personal level. “I just want to figure this out and go about this with no profession, no public anything, and now it’s been long enough where I’m in a lifestyle that I know is really working on a high road for my little journey, and there’s so much peace finally being had where there were demons.” Drew, we have nothing but respect for your honesty!

At the weekend, Australian model Elle MacPherson took to Instagram to celebrate 20 years of sobriety. She proudly shared a snap of her blue and gold Alcoholics Anonymous tri-plate token, complete with “XX” in the middle, which stands for 20 in Roman numerals.

Back in 2020, Elle opened up about her decision to go sober to mark a milestone for her 40th birthday. While speaking to Gritty Pretty magazine, she said, “It’s funny, 40 is such an introspective year. I actually got sober when I was 40. I felt like I wanted to spend time in introspection.”

The former Nickelodeon regular speaks openly about how he stopped drinking alcohol with the help of a 12-step program. In a 2022 interview, he shared that sobriety that keeps him “anchored.”

“I’m lucky to have found recovery through a 12-step program almost 14 years ago, and it’s something that I still do regularly to this day,” he told Page Six. “It gives me a lot of structure in my life. It’s really the bedrock of my life and from it, all these wonderful things have been built.”

Demi Lovato was hospitalized for a nearly fatal drug overdose in 2018, and since then, the singer has completely turned her life around. Now living a healthy sober lifestyle, a source close to the star told Entertainment Tonight that “Demi is doing great. She’s sober and living a very healthy lifestyle. She’s surrounding herself with like-minded people that want her to stay that way and continue to support her positive choices.”

According to the source, Demi “goes to therapy, works out, eats clean, and does things that make her happy,” including hiking and writing music. They also added that she “makes herself a priority and has a very close-knit support system that she leans on.”

In 2024, the Florence + The Machine frontwoman revealed in a Spotify Original podcast, The Way We Are with Munroe Bergdorf, that she had been sober for eight years. It comes as she recalled her early days with the band, when she realized that during their rise to fame, she had issues with alcohol.

However, while discussing her life now alcohol free, the singer revealed that “sobriety is the best thing I ever did.”

Speaking to Vogue during an interview for the magazine’s April 2023 cover, Cara shared that she had proudly been sober for four months and reflected back on a series of paparazzi shots of herself taken in Van Nuys airport that sparked concern.

“I hadn’t slept. I was not okay,” she shared. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, ‘Okay, I don’t look well.’ Sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.”

Cara added that she “started drinking and partying” as a teenager, feeling “this need to escape and change my reality,” and spoke candidly about struggling with her mental health, possibly in part due to her mother's heroin addiction. “I’ve had interventions of a sort, but I wasn‘t ready [until after her 30th birthday blow out]. That's the problem,” the model also shared, when explaining how she decided to try therapy again, enter rehab, and commit to a 12-step program to build a life away from drugs and alcohol. “I always thought that the work needs to be done when the times are bad, but actually the work needs to be done when they're good. The work needs to be done consistently. It's never going to be fixed or fully healed but I'm okay with that, and that's the difference.”

According to Forbes, the supermodel once made a statement about her sobriety to her fans, saying, “I feel like I’ve been very lucky because I don’t really have an addictive personality. 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.”

John Mulaney was once sober from 2005 to 2014, and in December 2020, he voluntarily checked into rehab for alcoholism and cocaine addiction. At the time, an insider told Us Weekly that it “was a relief to his wife and family that he checked in,” adding, “John has always been engaged in his sobriety. The relapse got ugly, but it was his choice to go to rehab, which saved his life.”

The comedian has been committed to staying sober since.

In Lana Del Rey’s 2012 Women of the Year profile by British GQ, she explained that she struggled with alcohol addiction for most of her early teenage years and finally got sober before she turned 20 and moved to New York City to pursue her music career.

Known as much for his hilarious social media antics (let us never forget his Vine videos – R.I.P) as he is his music, fans of Tyler are likely already familiar with the artist’s wild side. But getting crazy drunk isn’t something that appeals to him. During an interview with Fantastic Man magazine, “I just don’t want to drink. I know that I don’t want to be that drunk guy. But I do know I want to hit a jump on a dirt-bike. I can look at that and say: ‘I want to do that.’ I’ve never seen anyone drunk, like, ‘Damn, I want to be that.’ So, I guess I just naturally got it pushed into my head that I have no reason to go over there and get fucking drunk.”

Rapper Jack Harlow quit drinking in 2021, crediting the move as one of the greatest decisions he's ever made. Speaking to Rolling Stone, the “First Class” hitmaker explained that while he didn’t feel like he had a problem with booze, it was around him much more often as his fame skyrocketed.

“I was sick of waking up with a dry throat, sick of feeling bloated and sick of the decisions I make on it,” he said, also sharing that drink sometimes made him feel “numb.”

Not drinking alcohol has long been a part of the rapper and designer's life – he told PAPER magazine, “Everybody else can do what they want, but that stuff isn’t for me. I’ve been drunk nine times in my life, and I ate some weed brownies once.”

For the actor, going sober wasn’t due to an addiction issue but a natural dislike of alcohol, although she has previously spoken about drinking during her time at university. “I didn’t really go to high school parties, and yeah, I didn’t touch pot till I was in my twenties,” she said during an interview. “I didn’t get flat-out drunk until I went to college. But I think that’s a good thing in many ways.”