Amanda Bynes hits ‘pause’ on her new podcast after just one episode

Amanda Bynes has announced that she’ll be putting a “pause” on her podcast after just one episode.

The Nickelodeon alum recently thanked fans and listeners of her podcast, “Amanda Bynes & Paul Sieminski: The Podcast,” in a 17 December TikTok, saying that she planned on taking a break after struggling to book the guests she really wanted for the show. The actor said that she had been eyeing a few top musicians as guests - such as Drake and Jack Harlow - but things didn’t pan out.

For the inaugural episode of the podcast, Bynes and Sieminski invited Los Angeles tattoo artist Dahlia Moth to talk about the hosts' “loves” in fashion, books, music, and more. On 18 December, the actor explained to TMZ that she wasn’t planning on talking about her personal life or her past on the podcast, episodes would solely focus on the guests instead.

The first episode brought the Hairspray actor back into the spotlight after taking a break to work toward a degree in fashion design at FIDM. In 2010, she stepped away from acting while at the peak of her career, and since then has consistently made headlines for her erratic behavior and struggles with addiction and mental health.

Bynes was placed into a conservatorship after reportedly starting a fire in the driveway of a Thousand Oaks home in 2013. In 2022, the nine-year legal arrangement was terminated, and Bynes said in a statement that she planned on prioritising her mental health and becoming independent. Not long after the agreement was terminated, she was placed on psychiatric hold, having reportedly called the police on herself.

Before her downward spiral throughout the 2010s, she was a talented child star who started on the SNL-esque tween sketch show, All That, which she starred on for three years before she was given the opportunity to lead her own TV show, The Amanda Show, which was fashioned by Nickelodeon producers to be a sort of Carol Burnett Show for kids.

Bynes was a rising starlet, often gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan or Seventeen, while appearing in blockbuster hits like She’s the Man, Hairspray, and Easy A. Although Bynes didn’t fall prey to the often cruel and misogynistic tabloid culture like so many young actors like her at the time, the actor explained to Paper Magazine that around 2007 - when she began to score more leading roles in films - she began to get into harder drugs.

“I started smoking marijuana when I was 16. Even though everyone thought I was the ‘good girl,’ I did smoke marijuana from that point on.” She explained, “I didn’t get addicted [then] and I wasn’t abusing it. And I wasn’t going out and partying or making a fool of myself... yet.”

“Later on it progressed to doing molly and ecstasy,” she admitted. “[I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice.”

She revealed that it was Adderall that she “abused,” learning about it through a magazine when she’d been working on Hairspray and reading that it was the new “skinny pill.” She reportedly was able to get a prescription after faking ADD to her psychiatrist. She credited her Adderall addiction with her downward spiral, telling the outlet that the tablets made her scatterbrained and too unfocused to properly deliver her lines.