AJ McLean Opens Up About Substance Abuse During ‘Really Dark Time’ With Backstreet Boys

The pop star revealed the turning point that happened onstage in 2001, when he realized “something’s not right.”

AJ McLean catapulted to fame as a member of the Backstreet Boys in the late 1990s, but he now regards the latter part of the band’s heyday as a “really dark time,” both personally and professionally.

McLean is among a host of pop musicians who appear in the new Paramount+ documentary “Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands.” In it, the Florida native recalls how the Backstreet Boys began to retreat from the limelight following the release of their 2000 album, “Black & Blue,” as the relationships between him and bandmates Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson became increasingly strained.

“With the Backstreet Boys, there was never a breakup, but 2001 was a really dark time,” McLean says in the doc, according to People. “We had toured for nine years straight — just go on tour, make an album, go on tour, make an album. And instead of dealing with my real emotions or my feelings, I kind of got caught up in the lifestyle and the partying and the drinking and the drugs.”

A turning point came, McLean explains, when he drank alcohol while performing onstage sometime in 2001: “That’s when I even had to know, ‘OK, dude, something’s not right.’”

Later that same year, he checked himself into rehab for the first time. By that point, he says in the film, Carter, Dorough, Littrell and Richardson were “just at their wit’s end” for varying reasons.