Josh Peck's Tragic True Life Story

"Turner and Hooch" star Josh Peck rose to fame in the early 2000s, first for playing various characters on "The Amanda Show" before taking on his career-defining role as Josh Nichols in "Drake and Josh." The series ran from 2004 to 2007 and spawned two spin-off films. Peck also branched out into film, voicing the possum Eddie in the "Ice Age" sequels before guest-starring on other Nickelodeon shows like "iCarly" and "Victorious" in 2009 and 2011, respectively.

Over the years, Peck's star has continued to rise, culminating in the New York City native starring opposite Chris Hemsworth in the 2012 action film "Red Dawn" and bagging guest roles in popular comedy series like "The Mindy Project" and "The Big Bang Theory." However, Peck's life was not as picture-perfect as it looked from the outside. In his 2022 memoir, Peck gave an unfiltered look at the struggles he's experienced, including his serious drug addiction, which began while he was filming "Drake and Josh." "I don't think a lot of people know that about me," Peck told Insider at the time of the book's release, explaining that there's a lot about his private life he's never shared before — until now.

Peck's now over a decade into his sobriety and tries to live a positive life focused on helping others, having gratitude, and celebrating his changed life and his big wins — like his cameo in Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer." But it's not been easy. Keep reading for all the details of Josh Peck's tragic true-life story.

Josh Peck's early career success may have led his fans to believe his life was all rosy, but it was a different story away from the camera. For one thing, Peck's father was absent from his life. Peck was born and raised in Hell's Kitchen with his mother and his grandmother, but his father wasn't in the picture. Peck revealed on "The Adam Carolla Show" that his mom got pregnant with him after having a brief relationship with an older, married man who she worked with. "Once he realized my mom was pregnant, that was it for him," Peck admitted, adding that the man gave his mom some money to stay away.

Even as Peck started to gain notoriety for his acting, his dad never reached out. In fact, they had no contact at all throughout his life, and Peck never met him. When he was in his mid-20s, Peck started looking into where he came from and thought about getting in touch with his dad, but it turned out this wasn't possible. "By the time I was interested enough or had the guts to look for him, he had passed away," he revealed.

Afterward, Peck learned that he had three much older half-siblings (they were adults when he was born), but since he's unsure if they even know about him, he has decided not to reach out to them so as not to blow up their lives. He now has no connection to his father's side of the family.

Josh Peck's career in the entertainment industry first began when he was 10 years old. Unlike many child actors he didn't start out by appearing in commercials, but kicked off his career doing stand-up comedy, as Peck explained on the podcast "About Last Night."

Aside from having a passion for comedy and the arts, part of Peck's decision to pursue stand-up was to combat the bullying he experienced as a child. He admitted to Rey that he'd been the target of cruel weight-related and body-shaming jokes for most of his early life. "I got crushed my whole life. [Kids are] the meanest," he said on "About Last Night." Peck also revealed to People that at that time in his life he had a problem with food addiction, often overeating: "I used food and drugs to numb my feelings," he said, adding, "Comedy was my natural defense mechanism." Comedy helped him by allowing him to be completely immersed in something else. 

When Peck's career moved from New York to Los Angeles, he continued to feel this way. "There was a place for the chubby, funny guy ... I felt like I was living up to this thing that I always wanted," Peck explained on "About Last Night." However, off the screen, the bullying continued into his teen years.

While Josh Peck felt comfortable in front of the camera and making hordes of Nickelodeon fans laugh as Josh Nichols on "Drake and Josh," he did not feel like that offscreen. Reflecting on that time in his memoir, Peck said (via Parade): "I was getting to perform my favorite kind of comedy on a network I dreamed of being on, but on the other hand I was introducing myself to the world in a body I didn't want to be [in]."

In reality, he was struggling with his weight and appearance more than ever. Peck's food addiction played a part as he would eat to distract himself from his own emotional state and then be caught in a repetitive, unhealthy cycle. Later, Peck admitted on "About Last Night" that during those years he often didn't feel comfortable in his own skin.

As a result, Peck said that he felt he missed out on an important part of his life. "At 17, which is when I started losing weight, I was like 'oh, you missed it,' like, 'you kind of lost out on a good part of your teenage years,'" Peck explained. He added that starring on "Drake and Josh" afforded him plenty of opportunities to socialize, go to parties and experience typical teenage life, but that he would often exclude himself because of how he was feeling. "I just wouldn't allow myself because I wasn't comfortable," he admitted.

As a teenager, Josh Peck often held himself back from participating in social events because he didn't feel comfortable within himself. His weight contributed to this, and he thought that losing some of it would change things. Peck revealed that at age 17, he weighed over 300 pounds, which is when he began his weight loss journey and lost over 100 pounds in a year. His mindset was an important factor in achieving his goal, and he was focused on weight loss for health reasons and to give him more room to evolve as an actor, because he didn't want to be pigeonholed as the big funny guy. It took a vigorous exercise regime and restrictions on his diet, which ultimately helped him get a handle on his food addiction and overeating, but it wasn't an easy process. "It was just grit," Peck admitted to Men's Health.

However, when Peck did start to see the kinds of physical changes in his body that he'd hoped for, it didn't automatically fix all his problems. "I had lost all this weight and for the first time in my life I was in control of my eating ... things were looking good for me, but my mind hadn't caught up yet," Peck admitted in his book (via Parade). Sadly, this mental struggle quickly sent the actor down a dark path.

Josh Peck went through a huge physical transformation when he was a teenager, but struggled with how he felt about it and himself afterward. Revealing what that time was like in his memoir (via Parade), the actor said: "[I] was holding on tight to the idea that I was still powerless, that the world was unfair, and that I had to reach for something to comfort myself."

Peck told People about his problems with addiction transfer at that time — how he replaced food with drugs and alcohol. "What is really clear is that I overdo things. And then I discovered drugs and alcohol. And that became my next chapter," he explained. This was the start of a serious downward spiral for Peck. "I think the most insidious or corrosive moment of my life was the first time I tried drugs, and I was 17," Peck admitted on the "Canceled with Tana Mongeau" podcast.

It wasn't long before Peck's new addiction had him breaking the law during some pretty low moments. The actor admitted to Insider that one night he brought a serious amount of drugs to a Hollywood party to impress a girl. Another time, he was involved in a semi-high speed chase trying to get away from the police, because he had drugs in the car and was driving under the influence. He ended up evading the cops, worried that if he was caught, he'd lose everything he worked so hard for.

Josh Peck's mother, Barbara Peck, was a single mom who worked hard to help her son achieve great career success, even moving then from New York to Los Angeles so he could work for Nickelodeon. But while his comedy skills almost surely made her proud, Peck knew she wouldn't approve when he started taking drugs in 2005. It's only now, looking back, that he can appreciate how those events played out from his mother's perspective. Reflecting on the "Canceled" podcast, he admitted: "I can look back on that now and go, 'Oof' ... I just felt like a cliché. And I was breaking my mom's heart."

It took some time before Peck realized how destructive his behavior really was. For a long time, he saw drugs and alcohol as an appealing escape. "I had this illusion of becoming more confident and attractive when I was partaking. I was trying to quiet that voice that woke me up every morning and told me I wasn't enough," he recalled to People. Eventually, however, it started to affect his career, and he found himself with a pretty poor reputation. That marked a turning point in Peck's life: "I had worked so hard for this thing and I was getting very close to losing it."

In 2008, Josh Peck was barely an adult. He had only just reached the legal drinking age, but he found himself checking into rehab. At this point, Peck had been suffering from his drug and alcohol addiction for four years. He came to the realization that he needed real help and admitted on "Canceled" that there were "a lot of close calls," both in a legal and physical sense.

Thankfully for Peck, he never hurt himself or anyone else while intoxicated and was able to get sober in rehab. He's since revealed that he used a 12-step program which is still part of his life today. "It gives me a lot of structure in my life. It's really the bedrock of my life and from it, all these wonderful things have been built," Peck revealed in his memoir (via Page Six), adding: "It's given me a foundation that has kept me really anchored."

Going to rehab and getting sober involves a lot of reflection and inner exploration — at least it did for Josh Peck. The actor took the time to really understand the root of his addiction and ultimately learned some hard truths about himself in the process.

Speaking to People to promote his memoir, he analyzed why he turned to drugs in the first place. "I was always looking for something outside to fix my insides," he said. "But eventually I realized that whether my life was beyond my wildest dreams or a total mess, it didn't change the temperature of what was going on in my mind. I knew that nothing in the outside world would make me feel whole," Peck added.

The actor opened up about this to Insider, too, telling the outlet that part of his problem stemmed from his dad choosing not to be in his life. Peck said that he often felt like he had something to prove. "When you have a parent who's absent in your youth, it makes you feel like anything is possible and nothing is secure," he explained. However, once Peck came to terms with that, he did the work he needed to do to heal.

Josh Peck and Drake Bell worked together steadily from the early 2000s (Bell also had a role on "The Amanda Show," which is where they met) until their last "Drake and Josh" TV movie in 2008. To the surprise of their fans, the duo didn't keep in touch after they parted ways. Their near-decade-long silence was broken in the strangest of ways, when Bell took his beef public and directed tweets at Peck and his new bride Paige O'Brien, asking why he'd not been invited to their 2017 wedding. Peck was shocked that he expected an invitation. "I didn't invite him to my wedding because I hadn't really talked to him in many, many years," he told People. Peck also revealed that he never would have admitted that, had Bell not gone on the offensive about his "missing" wedding invite.

Peck likened his and Bell's relationship to working together in a coffee shop when they were 16, but drifting apart as they moved on and entered adult life. They did reunite, however, at the MTV Video Awards a few years later. They made peace after Bell apologized to O'Brien, but swiftly lost each other's numbers again. And ever since Bell pleaded guilty in 2021 to child endangerment, Peck has made it clear that he wants nothing more to do with him, despite the fact that their names will be entwined forever.

Despite beginning his career in the entertainment industry as a pre-teen, Josh Peck has always been worried about money. During an appearance on "The Diary of a CEO," Peck clarified that his days on Nickelodeon in no way afforded him the opportunity to be set for life. "We made about $100,000 a year for the four years we were making ['Drake and Josh'], which is great money and a lovely middle-class lifestyle, but no one would assume that once you stopped working that you never had to work again," Peck revealed.

Even now, Peck admitted, "I'm as much, you know, worried about next year's financial status as anyone else because I don't have that security." Not having a lot of financial security growing up meant that money has always been at the forefront of his mind, especially now that he has a family to take care of. Peck got involved in the SAG-AFTRA protests because of this, noting on Bartlett's podcast that residual checks were not even a thing when he was a kid.

In today's ever-changing media landscape, Peck has looked to other mediums to make money, transitioning solely from acting to become a podcast host and YouTuber. This has afforded him the opportunity to get involved with brand partnerships and sponsorship deals. He told CNBC a lesson he's recently learned is "don't have all your eggs in one basket."

At 36 years old, Josh Peck is thriving. He's got a full acting career and is happily married to cinematographer Paige O'Brien, with whom he shares two sons, Max and Shai. However, fans were probably shocked on September 4, 2023, at which time the hashtags "RIP Josh," "RIP Josh Peck," and "Josh Peck dead" were trending on X, formerly Twitter.

Rumors quickly began circulating that the actor had died, but thankfully, it turned out that the news of his death was very much fake. The confusion apparently came out because the "Drake and Josh" alum shared his first name with a Donald Trump supporter who had passed away. Peck didn't directly address the death rumors. In fact, he was notably absent from X in September and October. But he let fans know that he was alive and well by releasing new episodes of "Good Guys," the podcast he co-hosts with influencer Ben Shoffer.

If you or anyone you know needs help with an eating disorder or addiction issues, contact the relevant resources below:

• Visit the National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA's Live Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).
• Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).