Where is Amanda Bynes in 2023? The former child star for Nickelodeon just launched a podcast and admitted to having eyelid surgery, and ended her Britney Spears-style conservatorship last year
Amanda Bynes is opening up about her experience with blepharoplasty, a procedure that removes excess eyelid skin.
“I was never open about this before, but I actually had blepharoplasty surgery on the skinfolds and the corner of my eyes. So, I don’t have those skinfolds any more,” she shared in a video on her Instagram Story last week.
The former child star called it “one of the best things I could’ve ever done for my self-confidence”, saying it was part of her “new look”.
Bynes, 37, rose to fame in the early 2000s, starring in classic chick flicks What a Girl Wants, She’s the Man, Hairspray and Sydney White.
The last film she appeared in was Easy A alongside Emma Stone and Penn Badgley in 2010, but she stepped away from acting and has now been out of the industry for over a decade. In an interview she did with interview with Paper Magazine in 2018, she said she “literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie [Easy A], and I didn’t like my performance”.
Here’s what Amanda Bynes has been up to since quitting acting.
What happened to Amanda Bynes?
As she detailed in the Paper interview, Bynes began smoking marijuana when she was 16, but soon started experimenting with harder recreational drugs.
“Later on it progressed to doing molly and Ecstasy,” she explained. “[I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice.” Instead she turned to amphetamines, saying “I definitely abused Adderall.”
After retiring from acting, she said she felt she “had no purpose in life”, adding: “I’d been working my whole life and [now] I was doing nothing.” She continued, “I had a lot of time on my hands and I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long.”
The conservatorship
Per USA Today, Bynes was placed under conservatorship in 2013. She had been accused of multiple hit and runs, was arrested in 2012 for driving under the influence in California, and again in 2013 for drug charges after allegedly throwing a bong out of a window, per Entertainment Weekly.
In February 2022, Bynes filed a petition to end her conservatorship, with her lawyer telling People, “She believes her condition is improved and protection of the court is no longer necessary.” It was terminated by a judge a month later.
Her nail venture
In October last year, Bynes made headlines when she enrolled on a cosmetology course to become a manicurist. She announced the news via Instagram, though it’s unclear whether she ever finished the course, as she was later admitted to a psychiatric facility, according to US media
A new podcast
However, Bynes might be making her entertainment industry comeback following the debut of her podcast, Amanda Bynes & Paul Sieminski: The Podcast.
Launched this month, it aims to “[focus] on the hosts’ loves: fashion, artists, actors, actresses, music and everything else!” per the pod’s Spotify bio. The first guest on the show is tattoo artist and model Dahlia Moth.
The struggles of fame?
- Amanda Bynes, the former child star who rose to fame with films Hairspray, What a Girl Wants, She’s the Man and Sydney White, is in the headlines again for discussing blepharoplasty
- Like Britney Spears, Demi Lovato and Lindsay Lohan, Bynes has faced her fair share of mental health struggles as a result of finding fame too young – so where is she today?