Michael Douglas did not hold back during a tense interview with The Sunday Times published over the weekend, snapping at a reporter who pressed him on his rumoured sex addiction and the number of women he had been with, ahead of the release of his long-awaited memoir.
The 82-year-old Oscar winner is promoting One Helluva Ride, his autobiography out on Tuesday, October 7, 2026, a book he insists is not, as some have suggested, full of sex, and when the Sunday Times journalist pushed on the topic, he grew visibly irritated.
The tension began when the reporter pointed out that Michael Douglas had written about needing to end things with five women before getting serious with his current wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones but Michael Douglas immediately pushed back.
“No, no, it’s not what it was,” he said, before clarifying what actually happened.
“What Catherine said is, if we’re going to continue this, then I want it to be monogamous. And so I therefore, that evening, you know, made some calls to some people I was seeing, and that was that.”
The reporter noted in the profile that the following silence and Michael Douglas’s expression suggested he believed he had just corrected her, and that his tone grew increasingly accusatory and his eyes narrowed as the conversation continued.
When the journalist pointed to a decades-old claim that Douglas had checked himself into rehab for sex addiction in the 1990s, he flatly denied it.
“A British tabloid editor came up with this story, which, thank you very much, here we are talking about at 82,” he said, before adding a pointed dig at British press culture. “It happens with the tabloids and, well, I won’t blame your country alone, but you’re probably better known for it than most. It wasn’t true.”
He also took aim at what he perceived as an obsession among British journalists specifically, asking, “My curiosity is why, of all countries, of all the press that I do, why are the Brits so consumed with the issues of sex?”
In the memoir itself, Michael Douglas is even blunter about the sex addiction claim, reportedly writing that he “was never a f—ing sex addict.”
