Getting sober has become one of the few things celebrities will talk about honestly. No publicist spin, no redemption arc packaged alongside a lifestyle brand — just the actual account of what wasn’t working and what they did about it. Maybe that’s because addiction doesn’t leave much room for image management. You either tell the truth about it or you don’t.
What’s striking about the eight people on this list isn’t just that they got sober. It’s how many of them, in telling that story, eventually arrive at the same word: faith. Not as a tidy ending or a PR-friendly pivot, but as the thing they found when they stopped numbing out and finally had to reckon with what was underneath. For some, that reckoning led straight to God. For others, the spiritual dimension is quieter — less theological, more like the slow discovery that honesty, community and surrender are doing something that looks a lot like what faith is supposed to do.
These are eight different versions of that story.
Tom Holland
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Holland came out of Christmas 2021 having drunk more than usual and decided to try Dry January — just a reset. What followed surprised him. The harder part wasn’t the first month; it was realizing he couldn’t let it go even when he wanted to. He extended the experiment month by month until his June birthday, by which point he’d diagnosed the problem clearly.
“I’m happy to say it — I was definitely addicted to alcohol. I’m not shying away from that at all,” Holland said on the “On Purpose with Jay Shetty” podcast in 2023. “By the time I got to June 1st, I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I could sleep better. I could handle problems better. Things that would go wrong on set that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had such better mental clarity. I felt healthier, I felt fitter.”
Holland doesn’t frame his sobriety in spiritual terms, but there’s a recognizable kind of reckoning in what he describes — an honest inventory of the gap between who you want to be and who you’ve actually been. He’s since launched BERO, a non-alcoholic beer brand, which suggests sobriety has become something he’s willing to build an identity around.
Denzel Washington
Washington’s relationship with alcohol looked, from the outside, like sophistication: a 10,000-bottle wine cellar built in 1999, the best bottles, two a day. He never drank on set or while preparing for a role — he’d clean up, go back to work, finish the job, and then return. He quit around age 60 and has now been sober for more than a decade. In December 2024, he was baptized at Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ in Harlem, a milestone he described as a continuation of faith that has been central to his life since childhood — his father was an ordained Pentecostal minister.
“Things I said about God when I was a little boy, just reciting them in church along with everybody else, I know now,” Washington wrote in a 2024 Esquire essay. “God is real. God is love. God is the only way. God is the true way. God blesses. It’s my job to lift God up, to give Him praise, to make sure that anyone and everyone I speak to the rest of my life understands that He is responsible for me.”
Jason Lee
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Before Earl Hickey, Jason Lee was one of the best skateboarders in the world — co-founder of Stereo Skateboards, Golden Globe nominee, a figure who’d built his whole reputation on fearlessness. Four years ago, he got sober. He marked the milestone recently on Instagram during Men’s Mental Health Month, in a post that was specific and free of performance.
“After many ups and downs and ons-and-offs with drinking over many years, I committed to real sobriety four years ago today, thus finally saying goodbye to not always being in the driver’s seat and to that certain dreadful brand of anxiety and depression unique to alcohol,” Lee wrote. “With intentional sobriety, therapy, and my faith in God, it’s nice to finally feel like I’m on solid ground, with a clear horizon ahead. Vulnerability is not weakness.”
Miley Cyrus
A 2019 vocal cord surgery forced Cyrus into weeks of mandatory rest — no alcohol, no smoking, no late nights — and she started paying attention to how she felt. The sobriety that followed wasn’t linear: she relapsed during the pandemic and was honest about it, describing herself as someone who simply isn’t a moderation person. What’s striking is where she’s landed. In a 2025 CBS Sunday Morning interview, she explained how sobriety wasn’t just healing for her body but for every aspect of her life.
“I like showing up 100 percent, 100 percent of the time,” she said. “I love that if anything comes in — an opportunity — I can say yes, knowing that I’m going to be ready. I don’t have to get ready.”
Jessica Simpson
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Simpson grew up in the church — her father was a minister — and spent a long time at war with the distance between that origin and the life she’d ended up living. By 2017, that tension had a specific shape: alcohol, Adderall and a Halloween party at her home where something finally clarified. She detailed the years of addiction in her 2020 memoir “Open Book,” got sober in November 2017 and has spoken openly about it ever since. In November 2025, marking eight years, she posted what amounted to a full testimony.
“Eight years ago today, I made the choice to confront, to confess and to let go of the self-sabotaging parts of my life that I was choosing,” Simpson wrote. “Making that decision allowed me to fully live in the pursuit of God’s purpose for my life. Alcohol silenced my intuition, blocked my dreams and chased my circulating fears of complacency. Today I am clear. Today I am driven by faith. It was not in the fight that I found my strength, it was in the surrender.”
Kat Von D
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Von D got sober in 2008, motivated not by crisis but by craft: when drinking began affecting the precision of her tattoo work, she stopped. What came after took longer and went further. In 2022 she publicly renounced the occult and witchcraft practices that had been part of her identity for years. In October 2023 she was baptized at a small Baptist church in Vevay, Indiana — a town of roughly 1,500 people to which she and her family had relocated from Los Angeles — and she later joined the Orthodox Church. She’d grown up with Christian missionary parents, run from it at 14 and spent decades searching through new age frameworks before arriving back at the faith she’d been raised in.
“I would look around at my Christian friends, and I’m like, they’re not perfect by any means, but I want what you have,” Von D told podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey. “I don’t want these crutches in my life anymore, and that’s what really I saw them as. I just want Jesus, and it’s a very narrow road. I feel like all these other things — these breathing techniques, spell work, nature worship — they’re just crutches. They’re not really my answer.”
As of July 2026, she’s celebrating 19 years of sobriety.
Rob Lowe
Lowe got sober on May 10, 1990. He was 26, the fallout from a very public sex tape scandal had reshaped his career, and one morning he was too hungover to pick up the phone when his mother called to tell him his grandfather was in critical condition. He stood at the mirror and understood: this is no way to live. He was in rehab two days later. On his 30th sober anniversary, he posted what he’s come to know.
“30 years ago today, I found a sober life of true happiness and fulfillment,” Lowe wrote on Instagram. “From a treatment center in Arizona to a bomb shelter in Israel, I have come to know many extraordinary people, and the fellowship of recovery has changed my life and given me gifts beyond my selfish imaginings. If you or someone you love is struggling with any kind of addiction, there is hope.”
Lowe has credited the 12-step program’s spiritual architecture — surrender, community, rigorous honesty — with what has held over 35 years. His line on the subject, repeated for decades: you can only get sober for yourself. The interesting question, he’s said, was never whether to stop. It was what to build once he did.
Florence Welch
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Welch’s mother gave a speech at her 27th birthday party asking her friends to help keep her daughter out of the 27 Club. A few months later, Welch got sober. She describes herself as an all-or-nothing drinker — if she’s enjoying it, she can’t control it; if she’s controlling it, she can’t enjoy it. Every album Florence + the Machine has released since 2014 was written and recorded without alcohol, and she’s been specific about what that shift actually felt like.
“Sobriety was really lonely,” Welch said in a 2022 interview. “I had got into music to drink, you know, these two things that I loved the most. Singing, partying and alcohol are the things I was good at. What sobriety does is, you come to see yourself clearer than you ever have done before — and a lot of the stuff that you drank to get away from is just there all the time.”
Welch doesn’t reach for Christian language when she talks about any of this. But her musical vocabulary has always been theological — bodies, souls, grace, the caught-mid-fall quality of being human. She’s said directly that live performance is her sense of spirituality. Getting sober wasn’t the end of that frequency. It was the moment she started writing from somewhere more stable and discovered the urgency was still there.
