Celebrity Inspiration
Why Did Rob Delaney Quit Drinking?
A dangerous accident turned the comedian’s life around.
Norris and Delaney
Rob Delaney is a stand-up comedian who rose to fame about a decade ago thanks to his Twitter account. He was one of the first comedians to dive into using social media as a platform to publish new jokes, and he was able to leverage his Twitter success into an acting career.
I have to admit that I didn’t have a clue who Delaney was until seeing the sitcom Catastrophe. In the show, Delaney stars as Rob Norris, an American who moves to England after his London fling unexpectedly gets pregnant. (Delaney also co-wrote the show, alongside his co-writer and co-star Sharon Horgan.)
When the series begins, Delaney’s character, Norris, is a recovered alcoholic who has already been sober for many years. I started watching the show a couple of years after I got sober, and I immediately loved the way that it portrayed Norris’s recovery. It felt more realistic to me than the vast majority of sobriety stories that I had seen in TV shows and movies.
It turns out that there’s a good reason for this: Norris’s sobriety was inspired by Delaney’s real-life sobriety. In an interview with IndieWire, Delaney said that…