Matthew Perry became a famous series star as Chandler Bing in “Friends”. Behind the camera, he battled his addiction problems.
Matthew Perry (1969-2023) will forever be remembered by series fans in his role as Chandler Bing in “Friends”. The late actor appeared in all ten seasons of the most successful series of the 1990s. Aside from his great success, Perry battled his addiction problems, which he spoke openly like never before in his biography last November.
Career on TV
Matthew Perry was born on August 19, 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and grew up in Ottawa, Canada. He attended elementary school there with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (51). His father John Bennett Perry (82) was an actor and model. As a teenager, Perry moved to Los Angeles, attended high school there and played tennis successfully.
At school, Perry was already on the theater stage, and later he got his first guest appearances on television. These included the series “Second Chance” and the film “Morning Maggie.” His big breakthrough came in 1994 with the NBC sitcom “Friends”. With his comedic talent, he developed Chandler Bing, who is known for his sarcastic sayings, into a cult figure and was nominated for an Emmy in 2002 for his performance. The series ran for ten seasons from 1994 to 2004 and, in addition to Perry, also made Jennifer Aniston (54), Courteney Cox (59), Lisa Kudrow (60), David Schwimmer (56) and Matt LeBlanc (56) world-famous stars and with a $1 million salary to top earners.
At the time, Perry also took on roles in films such as “No Half Measures” and “No Half Measures 2 – Now!” with Bruce Willis (68) or “Fools Rush In – Heart Over Head”. He had guest appearances in the series “Beverly Hills, 90210”, “The West Wing – In the Center of Power” and “Scrubs – The Beginners”.
Despite his success, Perry struggled with drug problems behind the scenes. He was also often drunk on set. He told Britain’s BBC Radio 2 in 2016 that he couldn’t remember much of the “Friends” filming. In 2013 he said: “I had a big problem with alcohol and pills and couldn’t stop. At some point it got so bad that I couldn’t hide it anymore, and then everyone knew.” His problems were accompanied by large fluctuations in weight, which are reflected in the individual seasons. In the “Friends” reunion, which was celebrated in a TV special with all the cast in 2021, the actor explained how difficult it was for him to film the cult series. “If the audience didn’t laugh, I felt like I was dying.”
He also reported in detail about his years of addiction in his biography “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” which was published in November 2022. “The highs were high, the lows were low,” the actor announced the book. “But I lived to tell the story, even if at times it seemed like I wouldn’t make it.”
“Nobody survives this”
In an interview With US journalist Diane Sawyer (77) for the book release, he spoke about the “scary” moment when “Friends” colleague Jennifer Aniston asked him about his alcohol problem. She told him that she and the rest of the cast knew “that you drink,” Perry recalled. “Imagine how scary that moment was,” he continued. Aniston was the one who gave him a helping hand most often. He was “very grateful” to her. He battled his addiction for many years. “I probably spent nine million dollars or something getting sober,” he told the New York Times in October 2022. According to the newspaper, he had been clean for 18 months at the time.
In his memoirs, Perry made it clear how life-threatening his addiction problems became. At the age of 49, he almost died after taking too many painkillers and his intestine burst, the TV star reported. He was in a coma for two weeks and spent a total of five months in the hospital. When he got to the hospital, “the doctors told my family that I had a two percent chance of surviving. He was put on a machine called an ECMO machine, “which does all the breathing for your heart and lungs. […] Nobody survives this.”
Cardiac arrest on the operating table
The actor also explained why he ultimately wasn’t seen in the Netflix hit film “Don’t Look Up”: Perry had a problem during filming suffered a cardiac arrest and was subsequently unable to return to the set of the Netflix film. The terrible medical event took place in Switzerland during a rehabilitation stay. It was triggered by the combination of two medications. Perry lied to his doctors in order to receive the painkiller hydrocodone. The star was then given the anesthetic propofol for an operation, after which his heart stopped on the operating table.
“I woke up 11 hours later in another hospital,” Perry wrote. During his cardiac arrest, the doctors treating him didn’t want “the guy from ‘Friends’ to die on their table.” During the five-minute resuscitation, Perry’s eight ribs were broken by chest compressions. The “Friends” star described the decision to leave the film as “heartbreaking” as the star-studded comedy was his “greatest film”. After “Friends”, Perry’s film roles were few and far between, such as in “17 Again – Back to High School” (2009). He appeared as Mike Kresteva in both “Good Wife” and the spin-off “The Good Fight”. He played Ted Kennedy in the critically acclaimed mini-series “The Kennedys: After Camelot” (2017).
Separation for self-protection
In his book, Perry not only revealed details about his years of alcohol and drug problems, but also about his love life. Famous names like Julia Roberts (56) were mentioned. Just two months after Roberts’ guest appearance on “Friends,” he broke up with her again out of self-protection. “Rather than face the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts,” Perry wrote in disbelief of himself in his memoirs.
The actor also reported on his encounter with another superstar in his book: He met Gwyneth Paltrow (51) in 1994, a year before his romance with Roberts – at a party in Massachusetts. “We crawled into a broom closet and snogged there,” says Perry, describing the scene. That was the last summer in his life where he could make out with a beautiful young woman named Gwyneth at a party and it wouldn’t bother anyone but her and him.
Most recently, Perry separated from his fiancée, literary manager Molly Hurwitz, in June 2021. “Sometimes it just doesn’t work out and that’s the case here,” Perry said in a statement to People magazine. “I wish Molly nothing but the best.” Perry and Molly Hurwitz have been a couple since 2018 and engaged since November 2020.