Five days ago, we closed a profile built around an interview with Charlie Sheen that will appear in the April issue of GQ. Since then, Sheen has continued doing what the article describes—texting and emailing the media (on Friday, he sent images of his new "Death from Above" tattoo to Entertainment Tonight) and calling in live to radio shows.

But Sheen also did something new: lobbed insults at his employers, specifically Chuck Lorre, the co-creator of Two and a Half Men, the top-rated sitcom on which Sheen stars. In a choice of words many saw as anti-Semitic, the actor referred to Lorre, who was born Charles Levine, as "Chaim Levine"—a name that Lorre himself has sometimes used. Sheen also called his hit show a "puke fest that everybody worships" and called the bosses who'd urged him to clean up his act "AA Nazis" and "blatant hypocrites." Sheen's spewing of vitriol appears to have pushed CBS and Warner Bros. Television to act. In a joint statement, the two companies suspended production of Two and a Half Men for the season, leaving at least 200 people out of work and canceling four planned episodes.

While there has been no word yet about whether the show will be canceled for good, Sheen himself has been voluble—if contradictory—on the topic. One minute, the 45- year-old actor has said he plans to show up to work even though the show's sets are shut down ("I'm going back to work," he texted

Good Morning America from an island in the Bahamas, where he was vacationing with three women—a model, one of his ex-wives, and a porn star—on Thursday). The next minute, he has said that he can't imagine working with the "turds" who run the show ever again. "Can you imagine going back... with those knuckleheads?" he told Pat O'Brien later that same day. "It would go bad quickly... We're pretty much done." Whatever his plan, Sheen seems determined to engage his corporate overlords in full-scale combat. On Friday, in a Fox Sports Radio interview with Pat O'Brien, he suggested CBS and Warners were in "absolute breach" and appeared to be gearing up for a legal battle. "We are at war," he said. "It's about to get really gnarly."

So wacky and self-destructive have Sheen's comments been that it's hard to imagine he's telling the truth when he repeatedly says that he has cured his addiction "with my mind," leaving him "100 percent clean" of drugs and alcohol (though on Saturday, RadarOnline.com posted results–and photos—of a preliminary urine test the site said it had conducted in his home; Sheen passed). On Alex Jones' show, for example, he interspersed his zingers about Lorre with references to trolls, F-18 fighter pilots and Vatican assassins. He reportedly texted RadarOnline.com that he was in talks with HBO about a new show—

Sheen's Corner—that would pay him $5 million an episode (an assertion promptly denied by HBO, which like Warner Bros. Television, is owned by Time Warner). On Saturday came another grandiose claim: Sheen reportedly told TMZ.com that he's writing a tell-all book to be titled When the Laughter Stopped. He wants the bidding for the publication rights to start at $10 million.

So what's driving Sheen? One answer is Apocalypse Now, the 1979 war epic that starred his father, Martin Sheen. As he told GQ, the movie—whose set he visited as a child—is nearly always in his thoughts (an assertion he only amplified with that new tattoo, which quotes the death card that Robert Duvall's character, Kilgore, throws on his victims in the film). "I'm not just my dad," Sheen said this week in one radio rant. "I'm putting up the river to kill another part of me, which is Kurtz. I'm every character in between, save for that little weirdo with his guts strapped in, begging for water. That's not me. But there are parts of me that are Dennis Hopper."