'Harry Potter' star Tom Felton details his escape from rehab

Harry Potter actor Tom Felton has described the moment he fled a Malibu rehab facility, less than 24 hours after checking in.

The star, who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, has detailed his rehab exploits in his memoir, Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard, according to Page Six.

Felton described the moment he found himself crying on a California beach after escaping rehab.

"All of a sudden, the frustration burst out of me," he wrote.

"I was, I realise now, completely sober for the first time in ages and I had an overwhelming sense of clarity and anger.

"I started screaming at God, at the sky, at everyone and no one, full of fury for what had happened to me, for the situation in which I found myself. I yelled, full-lung, at the sky and the ocean. I yelled until I'd let it all out, and I couldn't yell anymore."

A day earlier, Felton says he went to his manager's office to discuss what he thought was a film offer but was in fact an intervention.

Felton listened to letters written to him by various people in his life, including his girlfriend, Jade Olivia.

He says it was a letter from the person in the room he knew the least that moved him most.

"My lawyer, whom I'd barely ever met face-to-face, spoke with quiet honesty," he wrote.

"'Tom,' he said, 'I don't know you very well, but you seem like a nice guy. All I want to tell you is that this is the seventeenth intervention I've been to in my career. Eleven of them are now dead. Don't be the twelfth.'"

Felton's book describes how his life unravelled after moving to Hollywood to look for work.

"My world became one of crazy opportunity, elaborate nights out and - there's no other way of putting it - cool free s**t. I enjoyed it. Jade enjoyed it.

"For a while, it was lots of fun. But only for a while. The gleam soon began to tarnish. I never knew I wanted this kind of life. And as time passed, an uncomfortable truth quietly presented itself to me: I didn't want it ... I was in a lucky and privileged position. But there was something inauthentic about the life I was leading."

Felton says he had previously barely touched alcohol but began "regularly having a few pints a day before the sun had even gone down, and a shot of whiskey to go with each of them".

"It came to the point where I would think nothing of having a drink while I was working. I'd turn up unprepared, not the professional I wanted to be. The alcohol, though, wasn't the problem. It was the symptom."

Felton writes that he did find another smaller rehab facility after fleeing the first one in Malibu, but he was kicked out of that one after being found in a young woman's room.

"On a couple of occasions, the therapists caught me canoodling with [her] round the side of the building when we were pretending to put the bins out. One evening I committed the cardinal sin of sneaking into the girls' house and into her room," he wrote.

"I honestly didn't have anything particularly nefarious in mind. She had been quiet at dinner, and I wanted to make sure she was okay."

Felton says he did begin to gain control of his life and was happy for a couple of years before "the numbness returned".

He eventually went back to rehab, writing it was "one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make".

"But the very fact that I was able to admit to myself that I needed some help - and I was going to do something about it - was an important moment."

Felton is currently touring the US to promote his book.

This article was first published by the NZ Herald is republished here with permission.