Calling all Hollywood casting directors: Amanda Bynes is looking for her next great role.
On Tuesday, the 32-year-old actress’ friend and former What I Like About You costar Leslie Grossman swung by E!’s Busy Tonight, where she updated fans on Bynes’ desire to return to show business after a tumultuous few years away from the spotlight.
“She’s doing fantastic, she really is,” Grossman, 47, said. “She looks beautiful. And she’s very eager to get back into acting, which I think she’ll have no problem with. I think everyone wants to see her doing something.”
“She’s done so well, and she’s doing wonderfully,” Grossman continued. “I think all of us have had tough times in our lives and we haven’t had to do it on the glare of a camera. And I’m very, very proud of her. But she’s doing great.”
Grossman, who has starred on the last two seasons of FX’s American Horror Story anthology, spent four years working opposite Bynes on the 2002 sitcom.
The two actually reunited for dinner just last week, Grossman told host Busy Philipps.
“I met her when she was 16 years old and you don’t know what you’re gonna get when you meet a young star of a show, it could be a nightmare,” Grossman recalled. “From the get go, [she was] the sweetest, the funniest, the most hard-working, and just a wonderful person.”
After What I Like About You, Bynes went on to find big-screen success with films like She’s the Man, Hairspray, Sydney White and Easy A. But a series of painful personal battles caused her to retreat from Hollywood.
In November, Bynes opened up about what led to her breakdown and how she’s come out on the other side in a revealing interview for Paper Magazine’s third Break the Internet special.
She said she began using drugs at 16 when she smoked marijuana for the first time. “Later on it progressed to doing molly and ecstasy,” she admitted in the issue, adding, “[I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice.”
While she didn’t use cocaine, Bynes did say she regularly got high on Adderall. Her Adderall use led to her dropping out of the movie Hall Pass, where she remembered being “scatterbrained” from taking the pills, according to Paper.
But the real breaking point came after seeing herself in the Emma Stone film Easy A. Bynes recalled being so alarmed by her appearance in the film, which she viewed negatively, that it convinced her to quit acting on the spot.
“I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it,” Bynes told Paper. “I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason, it really started to affect me. I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things.”
Now four years sober, Bynes is thriving at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and is looking forward to continuing on with her Bachelor’s degree next year.
“She’s also still really committed to doing fashion,” Grossman said on Busy Tonight.
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