Matthew Perry: How to tell which drugs I used during ‘Friends’
Matthew Perry writes in his forthcoming memoir that his changing appearance throughout 10 seasons of “Friends” serves as a dead giveaway for which drugs he was using at the time.
“You can track the trajectory for my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,” the actor writes in “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” out Nov. 1.
“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.”
Perry, 53, shares that by the end of the third season of the hit NBC sitcom, on which he played Chandler Bing, he was trying to obtain 55 Vicodin a day — otherwise he’d get “so sick.”
The “Three to Tango” star attributes his extremely thin frame to his opioid addiction, as the drugs suppress appetite and cause vomiting. He writes that his weight varied “between 128 pounds and 225 pounds” over the course of the series.
Perry’s memoir also reveals that one of his stints in rehab took place immediately after filming his wedding to Monica Geller (Courteney Cox). Perry shares that he was immediately “driven back to the treatment center … in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician” after the scene wrapped.
Despite his best efforts to get sober, the “17 Again” star suffered a near-fatal health scare in 2019 when his colon burst because of the massive quantities of opioids he was injecting.
“I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs,” Perry recently told People. “And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”
Perry says he’s now 18 months sober, thanks in part to never wanting to have to live with a colostomy bag again.