Bryan Greenberg Reveals His Scary Brush with Opioid Abuse — and How It Inspired His New Film: ‘I Got Hooked’ (Exclusive)

Bryan Greenberg’s latest film role is based on painful fact, not fiction.

The actor, 45, acts Coupling, a film about the intertwined lives of people caught up in America’s opioid crisis. Hitting theaters on January 26, the dark drama also stars his wife Jamie Chung, 40, Sophia Bush, Ashley Madekwe, Josh Peck and Dascha Polanko, among others.

“There’s a wide variety of people that we see in the 90 minutes of this movie, but it all comes together in the end into one cohesive story,” Greenberg says of the film, which he also wrote and directed. “I took on a lot with this film, more than I’ve ever done with any other project. I decided to make my own story.”

And as the first-time director tells PEOPLE exclusively, it’s a story rooted in his own terrifying experience with opioids.

Junction Movie.

Courtesy of Verdi Productions

“My inspiration came because a few years ago, I’m not an addict, but I went in for routine surgery and was prescribed Oxycontin, and I got really hooked on them,” he says. “And I was sick from the drugs when I took them off.”

Greenberg says that more than a decade ago, shortly before he met Chung, he had hernia surgery and was prescribed Oxycontin for the pain. But he soon found himself on the slippery slope to addiction.

Meir Shavit

“It was like one pill turned into four pills a day, turned into 10 pills a day, turned into 15 pills a day,” he says. Before long, “I thought, ‘Oh, I should probably stop doing that, this is getting to me.’ Then, he describes, “It was like, ‘Oh, I’m sick without them. I need them. I’m actually physically sick without them.'”

This is the scenario that his character Michael, a man in the throes of Oxy addiction, portrays in the film. “He’s not trying to get high,” Greenberg says. “He just doesn’t want to feel sick. And that’s a normal thing. A lot of people are just trying to hit a baseline of not vomiting, not sweating, and not having a fever.”

Bryan Greenberg at Junction.

Courtesy of Verdi Productions

Fortunately for Greenberg, “my doctors just cut me off,” he says. “They were like, ‘You’re done.’ And I could have gone the illegal route. You can start finding pills in other places. And if you can’t find pills at that point, you could go to the street. Now, you don’t have to look far at all. .”

Aside from medical intervention, the star believes he was able to kick the short-lived habit in part because he’s a “control freak,” says Greenberg, “I don’t like things to have power over me. It was like, ‘You’re making me addicted so I’ll figure out what is being done and I will try to beat it'”

Greenberg still says, “Honestly, I feel like I’ve wasted a few months, and for that to happen to someone like me who’s not an addict, it really pissed me off. I wanted to explore how a system could be put in place that would make addicts out of people. ”

Jamie Chung in Junction.

Courtesy of Verdi Productions

His wife and Coupling the actress recalls when she first learned about his ordeal. “I remember him telling me that story when we first started dating,” she tells PEOPLE. “I remember asking about his [hernia] a scar near his belly button and it triggered his memory of stopping opioids.”

Chung continues, “I remember him telling me [taking Oxy] it felt so good and it was such a good pain reliever, and he had to slowly wean himself off of it because it was so addictive. He got very sick and it was very difficult for him.”

Greenberg wrote most of it Coupling while in quarantine during the pandemic, and initially Chung was not fully involved in the project. “I thought, ‘Bryan, what are you doing spending all this time writing this script? We’re hanging out, we’re slacking off. But he was so hyper-focused.’

Now, she says of Greenberg, with whom she shares two-year-old twin sons, “I’m so proud of him. It’s pretty much impossible to make a movie today. He was running around, raising money, finding producers. Every day was like pushing a rock up a mountain.”

Bryan Greenberg.

Meir Shavit

Filming the film was so grueling, in fact, that Greenberg ended up in the hospital shortly after production ended.

“I was physically in pain making this film,” says Greenberg, who shot the entire project over 17 days. “My stomach was killing me. Sometimes you can get so deep into a role, take on those physical attributes. I thought maybe it was just lingering. It would go away.”

Instead, Greenberg found himself in an ambulance in New York. “I ended up with this crazy stomach infection after everything I went through. I had to be in the hospital for 5 days. This movie almost killed me.”

However, the actor says it was all worth it. Coupling who recently picked up awards at the Portland and San Diego Film Festivals, the film is close to his heart. “I’ve lost friends and I’ve spoken to so many people, unfortunately, who have been affected by this terrible crisis.” He hopes that by sharing his story and his new film, he can help change the minds of victims of the opioid crisis.

“I think we need to stop looking at addicts as criminals,” Greenberg says. “That’s step number one. You have to empathize with these people and try to help them. It’s not a crime. It’s a crime that happened to them.”

The Junction opens in limited theaters and on demand starting January 26

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