Actor Charlie Sheen is back in front of the camera — this time to promote safe sex in an advertisement for a new line of condoms from intimate lifestyle products company LELO.
Sheen — who made headlines around the world last November when he revealed that he is HIV positive — is seen in the 3-minute video sharing his thoughts on why some people are hesitant to use condoms.
“I think people associate the word ‘condom’ with less pleasure. With less connection,” Sheen says in the video. “What may feel like five seconds of an inconvenience or a halted or (thwarted) moment can absolutely prevent a lifetime of potential grief and suffering.”
The 50-year-old Two And A Half Men star says safe sex and using condoms is part of a “dialogue that people don’t want to have, it’s uncomfortable.”
“A lot has to do with that fantasy belief that that could never happen to them,” he continues. “That’s something that I can speak to. I pretty much felt the same way.”
Sheen was a household name in the late 80s and early 90s, starring in classic films like Major League, Men at Work and The Rookie, and co-starring in hit television shows, including Spin City and Two and a Half Men.
But the partying, drinking, and a string of arrests for domestic violence and drug abuse, and unprotected sex all caught up to the A-lister.
Sheen says his HIV diagnosis humbled him, admitting that he finally understands the old adage, “Youth is wasted on the young.”
“There’s an odd combination now, people still want to be like me or experience my life, but there’s a little detail they want no part of,” he said, hoping that people watching his LELO ad will learn from his mistakes. “So they can avoid that by using this.”
The condom company’s website says its new product comes as a “giant leap forward in the fight for great, safe sex – with a structurally different design, that means you can see and feel the difference.”
“Hex is structurally different because it applies a unique hexagonal web throughout the latex, which means it looks and performs differently to any condom in the world today,” the website boasts.
LELO is also the company behind the Gwyneth Paltrow-approved $15,000 24-karat gold vibrator.
Sheen will next appear in the film Nine Eleven, which sees a group of people trapped in an elevator in the World Trade Center’s North Tower during the terrorist attack of September 11.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson
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