DARK CLOUD OF ADDICTION
Some reports claim Matthew’s issues may have been rooted in babyhood, when he was given phenobarbital, a major barbiturate, for colic. He certainly had an addictive personality – he downed his first bottle of wine at 14, starting a pattern that saw him routinely either drunk or high or both.
“Matthew was the kind of guy who didn’t do anything by halves, no matter what it was,” a friend says.
In 2016 he told the BBC he couldn’t remember three years of filming Friends because he was so out of it.
He became addicted to painkillers after a jet-ski accident in 1997 and at one point was taking 55 tablets a day. He would go from doctor to doctor for OxyContin, a victim of the opioid epidemic that gripped America in the 1990s and 2000s.
By his own admission he took every drug “except heroin, which scared me”. Drugs like OxyContin cause severe constipation and it was a blockage that caused his colon to rupture in 2018, putting him in a coma for 14 days and leaving him with a colostomy bag for nine months.
“I was full of s**t,” he was fond of saying, harnessing his old habit of using humour to cover pain.
His lungs were ruined too from years of chainsmoking and his doctors told him he’d be dead before he turned 60 if he didn’t quit.
He spent $9 million (now R162m) on trying to get clean and sober, checking into rehab 15 times over the years, attending more than 6 000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and going for therapy twice a week.
He developed a new attitude of sharing his battles publicly and, in an interview with The Times, spoke about the importance of his confessional stories and how he hoped they’d help fellow addicts.
“Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t want to share I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going,” he said.
His Friends co-stars helped him over the years, Matthew once recalled. “They were understanding, they were patient. It’s like penguins. When one’s sick or when one’s very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.
“I thought Friends was going to fix everything. It didn’t.”