Matthew Perry shares more details about his past and his struggle with addiction during an exclusive story with Diane Sawyer.
The Friends The star joined the ABC News presenter for a heavily teased hour-long special, where he opened up about his time on the hit show, his addiction struggles and his memoir Friends, lovers and the terrible big thingwhich comes out November 1st.
While the star admitted to Sawyer that “it’s not fun to talk about this stuff,” he said he’s speaking out now because he knows it’s “going to help people.”
During the interview, Perry talked about his first experience with alcohol and how he felt.
“I lay in the grass and I was in heaven,” he told Sawyer. “I thought to myself, this must be how normal people feel all the time.”
He said that at the age of 18 he was drinking “every day”. As he got older and began to book roles in Hollywood, the 17 again star had a guideline when it came to his drinking.
“I made a rule that I would never drink or take anything at work,” he said. “So I would do that, but I would blindly show the hangover. Like shaking and crazy hangover.”
The actor has opened up about how he started abusing opioids after he was prescribed painkillers in 1997. Eventually he said he was taking up to 55 pills a day and going to great lengths to receive medicines from doctors, in particular by having MRIs done for “false”. migraine.”
He also shared that he would “go to open houses” in hopes of finding the pills in the bathroom to “steal” them.
“I think they were like, ‘Oh, there’s no way Chandler robbed us,'” Perry admitted.
When the conversation turned to her time on the show FriendsPerry shared warm memories of his co-stars, with whom he appeared on the 2021 HBO Max reunion special. The actor called Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow “maybe the funniest person I’ve ever worked with”, and noted that Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer were “hilarious”. He also shared that Schwimmer, who was the star of the NBC sitcom’s first season, encouraged the cast to come together to negotiate their contracts as a unit.
Perry also recalled at the time Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston confronted him about his substance use disorder.
“She was the one who reached out the most, you know,” Perry said. “I’m really grateful to him for that.”
Other revelations from the hour-long interview include The odd couple star admitting to trying dating apps.
“I went and then quickly quit, it was stupid,” he said of trying to date online.
Perry, who has dated stars like Julia Roberts and Lizzy Caplan, opened up about how he was previously stuck in a bad relationship pattern.
“It was a combination of feeling like I wasn’t enough, feeling like I was needy, feeling like I didn’t matter that I was in relationships that were going well – with wonderful, funny, smart, wonderful women – and my subconscious, I was scared and broke up with them because I was scared they would find out those three things and tear me down,” he said. to Sawyer.
Perry recently made headlines talking about his near-death experience in 2018. He spoke to People magazine about how he was given a “2% chance of living” just four years ago while on life support.
Perry, then 49, spent months in hospital recovering from surgery following what his publicist described as a gastrointestinal perforation. However, in his new memoir, the actor details how he was actually in the fight of his life after his colon burst due to opioid use. He remained in a coma for two weeks and on life support. In total, he spent five months in the hospital recovering and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.
“Doctors told my family I had a 2% chance of living,” Perry told the outlet. “I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and lungs. And it’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”
Among the revelations of Friends, lovers and the great terrible thing, Perry estimates he spent $9 million to get sober. He is currently 18 months sober which means he got sober again just before 2021 Friends meeting.
“I was faking back injuries. I was faking migraines. I had eight doctors going at once,” Perry told the New York Times from shopping at the doctor to the height of his struggles.
Perry, who has also used OxyContin and Xanax, said: “I would wake up and I would have to take 55 Vicodin that day and figure out how to do it. When you’re an addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I I need to take three. And then I’m going to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to stay there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I definitely wasn’t a party animal; I just wanted to sit on my couch, grab five Vicodins, and watch a movie. It was heaven for me. This is no longer the case.”
Perry told Sawyer that his current dream day is “playing games…watching movies…I want to work out. I want to play pickle ball. I play it almost every day. That’s why this tan is real.”
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