Josh Peck hid drug abuse, insecurities, and trauma behind his funny-guy image. Now, he's coming clean.

Over the span of 10 minutes, seven people will call the police to complain about Peck's driving. A police car begins to close in on Peck, who thinks of the consequences of having his mugshot splashed across covers of tabloid magazines. He continues speeding his way out of Beverly Hills and escapes law enforcement.

This is not the version of Peck to which fans are accustomed. Not the teen actor known for his impeccable comedic timing as one half of Nickelodeon's "Drake & Josh." Not the adult husband and father who shares goofy videos on TikTok and sarcastic musings on Twitter.

For four years, Peck said, he struggled with addictions that went largely unnoticed.

"I don't think a lot of people know that about me," Peck told Insider. "And I'm glad there weren't camera phones in the early aughts."

Now 35, Peck is opening up in a new memoir, "Happy People Are Annoying," released on March 15. He's aware that his history of drug use could surprise people who still associate him with his family-friendly sitcom persona.

"It's pretty millennial of me to think I'm ready to talk about my entire life holistically at 35," he said. "But part of it was that I wanted to give a perspective from the halfway point.

"I've sort of lived this public life, but there was so much that I kept back and never shared with my audience because I just thought that that was the way things are done," he said. "I felt like it would behoove me, and I could hopefully be of more service to others, by being honest about the nuance and the things in which I went through, especially during those four years."

His parents were business acquaintances who had an affair, with his mom, Barbara Peck, becoming pregnant at the age of 42. Peck's biological father, then 62, already had a wife and three kids. He chose to not be involved in Peck's life.

Peck likened his "unresolved issues" with his dad, whose name he didn't disclose, to "bad fuel" for the metaphorical car of his life. (His father died in 2013, when Peck was 26 years old. The two never met.)

"I was going to prove to everyone, including him, how little I needed anyone or anything," Peck said. "When you have a parent who's absent in your youth, it makes you feel like anything is possible and nothing is secure."

Peck's childhood in New York City was marked by his mother's financial struggles. He credits her for doing the best she could under the circumstances, but it was hard "having this single mom, being an only child, being overweight, being the weird musical-theater kid in an age where the only social currency was being good at sports or having enough money for the newest video-game system."

Peck said his best friends were fictional characters: Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura, Will Smith in "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," and Adam Sandler in "Billy Madison." As a "chubby" kid, "I really looked up to the great, heavier-set actors, be it John Candy or Chris Farley," Peck said. "It just felt so powerful to have someone to be represented in that way."

All the while, he was "absorbing the rhythms of sitcoms through osmosis," he said. "Eventually, when it became my turn, I might not have known exactly what made something funny, but I knew what funny sounded like."

He saw kids his own age "making grown-up money, doing this thing that I love," he said. "Suddenly I wasn't the oddity at a normal school, where there were only a few kids who focused on performing arts and mostly just within the confines of the school play."

Peck's big break came when he landed a spot on Nickelodeon's "The Amanda Show," a sketch-comedy show starring Amanda Bynes that ran from 1999 to 2002. The "wildly talented" Bynes immediately made an impression on him.

"I tried to be this sort of quasi-apprentice to Amanda and watch her ability and try to dissect what it was that made her so great," Peck recalled. "She was only six months older than me but so ahead of me when it came to ability and skill."

Two years after the series ended, Peck and his fellow "Amanda Show" cast member Drake Bell landed their own sitcom, about two freshly minted stepbrothers with nothing in common. "Drake & Josh" ran for four seasons between 2004 and 2007, spawning two TV movies.

While "Drake & Josh" is arguably Peck's most notable work to date, starring on a hit sitcom didn't feel monumental to him at the time — especially in a period that predated social media.

"I was performing, doing the kind of comedy on the network that was like my holy grail growing up," he said. "But then I got to go home and have a certain level of anonymity and hang out with my best friend and play hockey in our apartment complex."

Behind the scenes, Peck continued to struggle with his weight. He wore Spanx during filming and went on an 18-month diet and workout plan when he was 17, losing 100 pounds to reach his goal weight of 180. He wasn't prepared for the blowback.

"That was surprising to me, that there were more than a few people who would say things like, 'You were funnier when you were fat' or 'Stop trying so hard,'" Peck said.

"A lot of people go through awkward teenage years, and then when they're through it, they burn their yearbooks and swear their family to secrecy," he continued. "But my awkward teenage years are in reruns.

But it's frustrating for Peck that fans can't separate the TV brothers from their real lives as actors.

When Peck married Paige O'Brien in June 2017, he didn't invite Bell to the wedding. Bell revealed his displeasure over Twitter, in posts that were later deleted, sending fans into an uproar. An anonymous "insider" told Us Weekly that Peck "was really hurt" by Bell's tweets. Bell addressed it in interviews. Feud timelines documenting the drama were born.

Peck said he was "totally surprised" by the reaction. In his view, they were actors who did a job for several years, then went their separate ways, with some contact here and there. The media attention was hard on his wife, "a private person" who "deserved to enjoy the afterglow of her wedding and not have to deal with trolls."

"People assumed that we were still sharing a bedroom in the attic, a decade later," Peck said. Knowing how much people loved his and Bell's TV dynamic, "I would've been happy to have died with that secret that we weren't the closest," Peck said. "Unfortunately, the world had different plans."

The pair continued to occasionally see each other after the wedding. Bell appeared in a few videos on Peck's YouTube channel, the last of which was posted in March 2019.

In August 2020, Bell was accused of physical and verbal abuse by an ex-girlfriend, which he denied. The following year, he was sentenced to two years of probation after pleading guilty to child endangerment. The charges stemmed from a 2017 incident relating to a then-15-year-old girl who attended one of Bell's concerts in Cleveland. The girl said Bell began "grooming" her when she was 12 and sent her sexually explicit messages starting when she was 15.

Asked about the last time he's spoken to Bell, Peck said, "Years ago. Many years ago."

"For a long time, if I walked into an audition room and saw Miles there, I would sort of turn around and go, 'Have a great time, Miles. You're gonna kill it,'" Peck said, laughing.

Peck particularly wanted the role of Stanley Yelnats in "Holes," the 2003 film adaptation of Louis Sachar's popular novel of the same name, about an unlucky boy who discovers a treasure chest while at a juvenile detention camp. It ultimately went to Shia LaBeouf.

"I wanted it so bad because I love the books," said Peck, who was 14 or 15 at the time of the audition. "But I'm the biggest fan of Shia LaBeouf as an actor. I just think he's just operating on another level. So I think they picked the right guy."

He did land a role as a drug dealer in the 2008 movie "The Wackness," starring Ben Kingsley. Ironically, he was at the peak of his real-life drug addiction when he got the part.

Peck started using drugs when he was 18, after his 100-pound weight loss. At the time, he'd entered Hollywood's party scene and was desperate to let loose. As he bounced around clubs and house parties, he became acquainted with a girl who he refers to as Jessica in his memoir.

One night, the pair found themselves in possession of "a felony's worth of drugs," he recalls in his book. Eager to partake and appear cool in front of his crush, he got high for the first time.

Despite his physical transformation, Peck still struggled with a poor self-image, he said. Drugs became an alternative to his previous reliance on food. Under the influence between 2004 and 2008, he said, he felt weightless, comforted, and free from the issues that had burdened him for years.

While Peck stayed sober for the duration of the "Wackness" shoot, he said, his substance abuse was catching up with him. He was underweight, with dark circles around his eyes. His personal relationships were suffering, and he was running out of money, too.

"There were too many close calls, too many rides across the lawn of the Beverly Hills Hotel, too many trips to the ER where I convinced them it was anxiety making my heart do that," Peck wrote in his book.

On February 15, 2008, Peck attended the first of what would become many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He's been sober ever since.

But major financial success was hard to come by. At some points, Peck said he was clearing only $40,000 a year after percentages were taken out.

"With kids' television at the time, you're making a nice living, but it's reflective of maybe a dentist starting out," Peck said. "So while you're doing it, it's great. But when you're done, you certainly only have a year or two of runway to find your next job.

"No one wants to talk about money, but I felt like I had to make clear where I was at the end of doing 'Drake & Josh.' I think a lot of people's misconception is that once you do a show like that, you're set for life."

To earn money outside of acting jobs, Peck joined the now-defunct social-media app Vine, which limited users to six-second videos. When Vine shut down in early 2017, he pivoted to longer-form videos on YouTube, where he invited his famous friends to join him for videos and participated in food-related trends.

Being a YouTuber required a lot more work than being a Viner, and Peck was aware that people assumed he was a washed-up actor turned influencer.

"I was having so much success on social media, which is not to be taken lightly," he said. "I was so lucky to be working in that area, and I had a wife and a son, but I think because my identity was so wrapped up in being an actor and it was something that I put over 20 years into, the idea that I perhaps might have to let go of that was what I was wrestling with."

Peck decided not to give up on acting, and his perseverance eventually paid off. He starred in "Turner & Hooch" on Disney+, a continuation series of the 1989 movie of the same name. He reunited with his "Drake & Josh" costar Miranda Cosgrove for the upcoming second season of her "iCarly" revival series at Paramount+. And he's now appearing on Hulu's "How I Met Your Father," in which he plays a school vice principal who's the love interest of the star, Hilary Duff. (A second season has already been confirmed, but Peck can't reveal whether he'll show up again.)

Through it all, he's kept up with social media, pivoting from YouTube to TikTok, where he has 7.5 million followers.

"Emotionally, I had to let go of this old idea that I would only be OK if I was successful as an actor because my life was good regardless of how I was doing professionally," he said. "And of course, once I did finally face that was when I had this really great busy year of work.

"It's just one of those wonderful universe moments, doing for me what I couldn't do for myself."

"But he was to this other family, and he was an older guy at the time that he met my mom, who made a mistake," he continued. "While he might not have done the ultimate right thing, I couldn't be the arbiter of that."

Peck said he "felt total closure" in December 2018, when he and O'Brien welcomed their first child, a son named Max.

"I got the amends from him that I always was seeking, by breaking that bad cycle and being a good father to my own son," he said. "Sometimes the amends you get is just by not passing the trauma to the next generation."

These days, Peck is keeping busy with at-home workouts, binge-watching shows like "Succession," and spending time with his son. Between TikTok, acting, and writing, he's still finding his way professionally, but personally, he's content.

"The conceit of the book is I'd spent most of my life thinking that happiness was reserved for quarterbacks and pretty people and people with generational family wealth, that everyone had received a manual on how to live life at birth, and I just was not privy to that," he said.

"What I learned, and what I'm sort of trying to convey in this book, is that happy people aren't anointed. It's not something that's just received once you've achieved a certain level of existence — it's really like a daily practice, and it comes and goes. But I think it's about not being attached to either one, the really happy moments or the challenging moments. Knowing that the universe demands balance — they're both coming, whether we like it or not."