The race between actor Ashton Kutcher and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey to reach 1m followers on Twitter took weeks. Actor and Hollywood bad boy Charlie Sheen managed it in just 24 hours.
The party-mad actor from the hit series Two and a Half Men and movies such as Wall Street and Platoon has become a byword for excessive living and his personal life keeps countless tabloid newspapers in business.
On Tuesday, Sheen caused a storm when amidst turbulent drama that saw police authorities in the US take two of his children into custody he opened a Twitter account. As soon as the account achieved ‘verified status’, in a matter of hours Sheen had amassed more than 200,000 followers and by yesterday morning this stood at 621,000 followers.
During the day, Sheen was adding followers at a rate of 20,000 an hour and during the evening soared past 1m followers on Twitter.
At the time of writing this morning, Sheen had 1.143m followers.
What’s the big deal?
People are beginning to question if its right to be morbidly fascinated with an individual clearly in self-destruct mode and you have to wonder if his sudden celebrity on Twitter is only exacerbating Sheen’s problems.
Actress and comedienne Joan Rivers probably summed it up best in her tweet to Sheen: “All this @charliesheen news reminds me of seeing Inception. I have no idea what the hell is going on, but can’t wait to see how it ends.”
