What Has Amanda Bynes Been Up To Since Retiring From Acting?

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In the early 2000s, Amanda Bynes’s rise to fame seemed unstoppable. She starred in All That and The Amanda Show on Nickelodeon before becoming a big screen celebrity with films like She’s The Man, Big Fat Liar, and What A Girl Wants, all while maintaining a “good girl” image.

But behind the scenes, Bynes, now 38, was struggling with the pressure of fame, then began to unravel when dealing with drug abuse and body dysmorphia. In 2010, she decided to permanently quit acting altogether.

Since her departure from the big screen, Bynes has had a lot of ups and downs. Here is where she is now and what she has been up to over the years.

Why Amanda Bynes left acting behind

While Bynes was excelling on-screen at Nickelodeon, horror stories of strange and inappropriate behavior from showrunner Dan Schneider have since surfaced. Despite not saying anything bad about Schneider, the effects of Bynes’ childhood fame did not remain a dream for long.

According to a 2018 interview with Paper Magazine, Bynes began abusing Adderall. She recalled a moment working on the film Hall Pass where she chewed so many Adderall tablets at once that her brain felt scattered.

“When I was doing Hall Pass, I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [more] high [that way],” Bynes stated. “I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines or memorize them for that matter.”

Bynes would eventually walk away from Hall Pass. Her final film was the 2010 comedy Easy A starring two-time Oscar winner Emma Stone. In the same interview, Bynes revealed that she watched her own performance while high on Marijuana, and was so critical of herself that she decided to quit acting for good.

“I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things,” she admitted.

She made her retirement official with a post on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Her battle with drugs and the law only got worse

After attempting to change the trajectory of her life, Bynes instead fell on harder times. Her battle with addiction only worsened, with pings for DUI, drug possession, and reckless driving throwing her back into the public eye. The former starlet was put on an involuntary psychiatric hold in 2013 after deciding to start a small fire on a stranger’s driveway. This led to her parents holding a conservatorship over her, one which began as temporary then turned into long-term ordeal.

She got sober, but still suffered from stress-induced episodes

Fortunately for Bynes, she celebrated four years of sobriety in 2018. However, her battles were not yet over. In 2019, she checked herself into a rehab facility for a stress-related relapse but managed to stay clean, and graduated from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising later that summer, a degree that is already paying off. Her conservatorship ended in the spring of 2022. One year later, she once again sought voluntary treatment after going through what TMZ reported as a “psychotic episode.”

Pursuing a new career

Bynes is now pursuing a career as a cosmetologist and is currently working on getting her manicurist license. She revealed these details in an interview with Us Weeklyback in April of this year.

“Since I haven’t passed the board exam yet to get my manicurist license, I started back at school to study manicurist theory and to practice doing acrylics before I take the test again, so I’ll be good to go when I get a job at a nail salon,” Bynes told the outlet.

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