In his upcoming memoir, Matthew Perry reveals he had to back out of Netflix’s acclaimed comedy ‘Don’t Look Up’ due to a major medical emergency…
As Rolling Stone and Variety report, Matthew Perry’s upcoming memoir, titled Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing tell why the actor had to pull out of Adam McKay’s Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up. Indeed, while he was at the time in a rehab center in Switzerland, his heart stopped for 5 minutes. He writes that a combination of hydrocodone and propofol caused the organ to shut down.
According to Rolling Stone, Matthew Perry was to play a Republican journalist there and had even already filmed a scene with Jonah Hill. The actor writes in his memoir that the Oscar-nominated satirical apocalyptic comedy would have been the “greatest movie he would ever have had,” one in which he even had to share scenes with Meryl Streep. The actor also reveals that during filming, he was already taking hydrocodone.
When Matthew Perry went to the rehab center, he then lied to his doctors about severe stomach pains in order to be prescribed the drug in question. “I was actually fine”, he writes. “I still felt like I was constantly doing sit-ups – so it was very uncomfortable – but it wasn’t painful.”
To ease his pain, the doctors then decided to operate to “put some kind of strange medical device in his back”. The actor took hydrocodone the day before his surgery and was then given the numbing drug propofol during the operation: a combination that stopped his heart.
I was given the dose at 11:00. I woke up 11 hours later in another hospital. Apparently the propofol had stopped my heart. For 5 minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack – I wasn’t in asystole – but nothing was beating. I was told that a beefy Swiss man really didn’t want the guy from Friends to die on his table and gave me cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for 5 minutes, kicking and kicking my chest. If I hadn’t been in Friends, would it have stopped at 3 minutes? Did Friends save my life again? He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight ribs.
Over the years, Matthew Perry admits to spending around $9 million on his sobriety. He concludes by writing that he was in too much pain after the medical incident to start filming Don’t Look Up again, a decision he describes as “heartbreaking”. The only scene he shot was therefore not part of the final result.
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thingwhich will be released on November 1, is already available for pre-order.