The one where my FRIENDS tried to save me
Matthew Perry spent £8million and half his life in rehab fighting drug and alcohol abuse. He lost his teeth, died for five minutes and even dumped Julia Roberts because of his insecurity. Thank goodness for his TV co-stars
WHEN Matthew Perry watches old episodes of his hit comedy series Friends, he isn’t listening for the jokes or enjoying the nuances of his performance as Chandler Bing. He’s looking to see whether he was abusing drugs or alcohol at the time.
“You can track the trajectory for my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,” Perry reveals in his shockingly honest new memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, published today.
“When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.”
He reveals how Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston tried to save him from himself, how Courteney Cox and David Schwimmer united the show’s sextet, and the fears that drove him to end a passionate romance with Julia Roberts.
But it is the spectre of Perry’s addictions – the Big Terrible Thing – that overshadows his memoir, which he opens by admitting: “I should be dead.”
He writes about a mortifying period of alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and becoming so ill that when he bit into a slice of peanut butter toast his top teeth fell out – “Yes, all of them.” He eventually had all his teeth replaced.
“I would give up all the money, all the fame, all the stuff…to not have this disease, this addiction,” he admits.
Perry, 53, reveals that by the third season of Friends, in which he played sarcastic but insecure Chandler, he needed 55 Vicodin painkillers to get through each day, or he would feel “so sick”.
As opioids suppressed his appetite or booze bloated him, his weight would fluctuate through the series from nine to 16 stone.
“I’ve probably spent $9million [£8million] or something trying to get sober,” he confesses, after 15 stints in rehab, more than 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and 30 years of twice-weekly therapy. The abuse took its toll: his colon exploded in 2018.
ON LIFE support, he spent two weeks in a coma and was hospitalised for five months. “I escaped death really narrowly,” he admits today. He has undergone 14 operations, including nine months wearing a colostomy bag, and reckons that by the age of 49 he had spent half his life in treatment centres or sober-living facilities.
Yet despite surgeons’ warnings that he risked wearing a colostomy bag for life, he still lapsed back into drug and alcohol abuse, most recently quitting only 18 months ago, shortly before last year’s Friends Reunion television special.
His last drug overdose came as Perry was poised to shoot opposite Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2021 dark sci-fi comedy film Don’t Look Up – “the biggest movie I’d gotten ever” – and almost died again.
Flying to a Swiss clinic to have a medical device inserted to alleviate his constant abdominal pain, before surgery he took a powerful opiate without telling his doctors. When given the anaesthetic propofol – “the drug that killed Michael Jackson” – the combination proved almost fatal. “The propofol stopped my heart,” Perry says. “For five minutes… nothing had been beating. I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table, and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding on my chest. “If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again? He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight of my ribs.”
Battered and bruised, Perry was forced to abandon the movie.
Friends – which followed the love lives and misadventures of six 20-something adults in Manhattan, New York – debuted on American screens in September 1994, and ran for 10 smash hit seasons. Broadcast worldwide to more than 100 countries, it made household names of Perry and co-stars Aniston, Cox, Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc. But through all 10 seasons, Perry confesses that he was only sober in one: season nine.
Sobriety remains a daily struggle for Perry, who even now lives with a “sober
companion” to watch over him and keep him on the straight and narrow.
The alternative could be fatal, he knows. He had his first alcoholic drink at 14, and was boozing daily by 18. He remembers his first painkiller, taken after a Jet Ski injury, feeling like “warm honey entering my veins”.
Feeding his addiction became a full-time job, he recalls, stealing drugs from strangers’ medicine cabinets while touring homes for sale, and visiting several doctors a day seeking painkillers.
“I would fake back injuries,” he told The New York Times. “I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time... It’s exhausting, but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer. I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”
His Friends co-stars could do little to help Perry battle his demons, but Jennifer bravely tried to intervene, “in a kind of weird but loving way”. She said the cast knew he was drinking again: “We can smell it.”
“She was the one that reached out the most, and I’m grateful to her,” he says.
Perry confesses that years before Friends debuted he asked Jennifer out on a date. She declined, saying she’d rather just be, well, friends.
Perry’s other co-stars rallied around him: “They were understanding and they were patient. It’s like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up… That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
Courteney, the most famous among the six before Friends launched, set the united tone by saying: “There are no stars here. This is an ensemble show.”
It was David who proposed that the sextet negotiate their contracts as a group, giving them the unprecedented bargaining power that earned them each $1million per episode. Julia Roberts agreed to guest-star on Friends in 1996, only if her storyline involved Perry – and if he could explain quantum physics to her. He “hit the books” and wrote her a long scientific paper.
The Pretty Woman star not only appeared on the show, but dated Perry.Yet his insecurities torpedoed their romance.
“I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me,” he writes. “I could never be enough: I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
MONTHS after penning his memoir, Perry sat down to actually read it, “and cried and cried and cried. I went: ‘Oh, my God, this person has had the worst life imaginable!’ And then I realised: This is me I’m talking about!”
Perry still hopes to marry one day and have children, saying: “I think I’d be a great father.”
But he continues to battle his addictions and insecurities, recognising that writing a memoir doesn’t end his struggles.
“It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better,” he says. “Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.” Close friend and former costar Lisa Kudrow says: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”
‘The surgeon didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table. He did CPR on me for five minutes’
●Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry (Headline, £25) is published today