Corey Feldman found himself in a dark place over the backlash he faced following his Today show performance last week, which you can watch in the video above. The former child star, 45, opened up about his state of mind at the time in an exclusive interview with Us Weekly.
As previously reported, Feldman made headlines for what some considered a bizarre appearance on the NBC morning show on Friday, September 16. He belted out his latest single, “Go 4 It,” which is off his new album, Angelic 2 the Core, in a performance with women dressed as angels.
“One thing I want to say is that everyone was singing and playing live and playing real musicianship there. There was no faking it, there was no lip-synching,” Feldman tells Us. “[The girls] were thrilled. They were like, ‘Oh, my God, we did it!’ I’m like, ‘Good job, everybody.’ And then I get on the plane and I immediately start sobbing. They’re all looking at me like I’m crazy. They’re like, ‘What’s your problem? We did great, right?’ I said, ‘You did do great. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to like what I did. But that’s all right.'”
Indeed, critics immediately took to social media after Feldman’s set to poke fun at the Goonies actor. He cried about the situation in since-deleted Facebook videos.
“They just dive in with the worst, the nastiest, the filthiest comments I’ve ever read,” he tells Us. “Like, ‘The wrong Corey died’ or ‘Why don’t you just go OD?'” (Feldman’s late best friend, actor Corey Haim, died of pneumonia at the age of 38 in 2010 after years of drug abuse. The Lost Boys star has been clean and sober since 19.)
Feldman believes that he would have harmed himself over the negative comments if he hadn’t faced backlash before. “I don’t care if you’re hiding behind a computer or a keyboard — it’s not an excuse. It’s not acceptable,” he says. “The somebody that you’re talking about is a real person with real feelings and real emotions. And I’ll tell you what, if I hadn’t been through this one thousand times, I might’ve taken my life over it. And then how would everybody feel?”
“That’s all I could think about when I went on that plane,” he adds. “What if the plane crashed? I was thinking, ‘What would happen if I died in a plane crash right now? How would everybody feel?’ That the last thing that I saw before I got on that plane was them calling me a piece of crap.”
Feldman was particularly worried about what his son, Zen, 12, would think. The Stand By Me star shares custody with his second ex-wife, actress Susie Feldman. The pair divorced in 2014 after 12 years of marriage.
“I didn’t get him until Sunday, so my whole emotional breakdown happened before he came back. [By then] I was already kind of on the upside. That’s when I did my second Facebook post saying, ‘OK, I’m cool now,'” he explains. “That’s mostly because I knew my son was coming home and I had to put on the brave face. But at the same time, he was like, ‘Look, Dad, I know you’re upset, you can tell me what’s going on.’ I was like, ‘Well, there’s been some press,’ and he’s like, ‘I know, I saw it.'”
Despite the harsh criticism, Feldman is proud of putting himself out there. “Going into anything, you’re going to have some people love it and you’re going to have some people hate it and that’s OK. … I stand behind it 100 percent. We have gotten a lot of interest,” he tells Us. “When they see you pulling in these kinds of numbers, like 10 million views on a video in two days, that’s really unheard of. Nobody expected this. But whether you love it or you hate it, you can’t stop watching it. And that sells tickets. At the end of the day it’s success. We have succeeded.”
Watch Feldman’s Today performance in the video above!
