Jason Bateman shares how wife Amanda kick-started his sobriety journey

Jason Bateman has revealed he decided to get sober because his drinking caused "tension" between him and his wife, Amanda Anka.

Anka called the "drip, drip, drip" of her partner's partying decades ago "annoyingly unpredictable", the actor shared with The Hollywood Reporter.

She asked the Ozark star when the spigot was going to "completely turn off".

Bateman recalled they had "a few negotiations" about his drinking, explaining that his wife "didn't demand that I completely absolve, but that was sort of the back-and-forth.

"I was like, 'Well, I feel like my ETA is six months away, but if I could land this plane now, it would alleviate a lot of the tension, so let's just do it,'" the SmartLess podcast host continued.

Bateman, who struggled with an addiction to alcohol and drugs throughout the 1990s, clarified that he has since abstained from alcohol and cocaine, which he dubbed "the Scarface stuff", but does smoke marijuana.

"I've got friends who had bottoms that were pretty chilling, but I was lucky enough to recognise, 'This is probably as far as I should go if I still want to accomplish the things that I want to get to,'" he told the outlet.

"I was conscious the whole time of wanting to get a lot of these boxes checked before I became a father and a guy with a career that I not only wanted but had a feeling I might be able to get, if I just got the right job," the Emmy winner added.

Bateman married Anka in July 2001, the same year he got sober. The couple share two daughters born in 2006 and 2012.