Matthew Perry candidly spoke about death just one year before he was found dead at age 54 of an apparent drowning.
The beloved “Friends” alum wrote about his decades-long excessive use of alcohol and pills in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” as well as during interviews promoting the book.
“I say in the book that if I did die it would shock people, but it wouldn’t surprise anybody. And that’s what I’m doing with writing this book. That’s why I wanted to do it,” Perry told People ahead of the memoir’s release last November.
He continued: “I wanted to talk about the highs and the lows because people are suffering out there and maybe if they hear a story from somebody they’ve seen on TV that’s worse than their’s or just the same of their’s, they’ll be filed with hope, which is the key thing.”
In a separate interview with The New York Times, the actor said he had been sober for 18 months and had “probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober” after his struggles with alcohol and opioids. At one point, he said he was taking 55 Vicodin pills daily and going to open hours to steal from strangers’ medicine cabinets.
Perry was even “driven back to the treatment center …in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician” right after filming the “Friends” Season 7 finale, where Chandler Bing and Monica Gellar (Courteney Cox) get married.
“[I was] at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show,” he told the New York Times. “When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to 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.”
Perry noted in his book that he “should be dead” because of what he had been through trying to get sober. He would end up going to rehab 15 times over the years and in 2018, his colon burst as a result of his drug use. Doctors told him he had a two percent chance to live.
“I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that,” he told People. “There were five people put on an ECMO machine that night and the other four died and I survived. So the big question is why? Why was I the one? There has to be some kind of reason.”
He added: “Your sober date changes, but that’s all that changes. You know everything you knew before, as long as you were able to fight your way back without dying, you learn a lot.”
While promoting his memoir, he’d later go on to tell Jess Cagle that he “felt very secure in his sobriety.”
“It took very hard work to get there. Because you can’t write a book like this and then, you know, you appear drunk at your local bar,” he said at New York City’s Town Hall last year.
“The kind of message that I guess I give out with this book is don’t give up. There’s help out there. I’ve been helped on a daily basis. If I didn’t get help, I wouldn’t be sitting here. It’s all about finding somebody that knows more than you about this stuff and just listening to them.”
Perry is best known for starring on “Friends” for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 with his close pals and co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc.
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