Matthew Perry has had dozens of life-saving surgeries, been to rehab clinics 15 times and spent $9 million to get clean while struggling with drugs and alcohol.
Perry died at age 54 “after drowning in his home hot tub,” sources told TMZ on Saturday, although no drugs were found at the scene and there was no evidence of crime.
Law enforcement sources told the outlet that the actor was found at a home in Los Angeles on Saturday after first responders were called to the scene for a “cardiac arrest.”
As his relatives rushed to the Los Angeles hospital, where they were told the then 49-year-old had only a two percent chance of survival, doctors prepared to transport the “Friends” star with a machine nicknamed “Hello.” are you, Mary”. ‘
It is used to mechanically oxygenate the blood to allow the heart and lungs to rest and heal. It is considered a last resort.
Perry needed urgent action due to his years of drug abuse, heavy drinking and addiction to strong painkillers.
On that turbulent night in 2018, he suffered pneumonia and a ruptured colon due to his opioid addiction.
Shortly after being admitted to the hospital, he fell into a coma that lasted two weeks.
When he came to, he discovered that he had been fitted with the colostomy bag, which he would have to wear for the next nine months.
Matthew Perry (pictured in September 2021), 54, was found dead on Saturday after drowning at his home in LA. No drugs were found at the crime scene, but he struggled with alcohol and drug addiction for decades
pictured Matthew Perry in Los Angeles on October 12, 2022, as he went out for a relaxing afternoon. This came as the notoriously private actor revealed that he almost died from alcohol and drug addiction
The actor became an international sensation almost overnight after landing the role of Chandler Bing in 1994’s “Friends.” Pictured with co-star Courtney Cox
But even that wasn’t enough to keep him sober.
Two years later, his heart stopped beating for five minutes after doctors at a luxury rehab facility in Switzerland administered a sedative that interacted with the opioids in his ravaged body.
They managed to revive him, but broke eight ribs in the process, forcing him to abandon his role opposite Meryl Streep in the film Don’t Look Up.
Perry described this missed opportunity as “heartbreaking,” but the consequences of his addiction went far beyond a single missed film role.
These two near-death experiences are just part of the catalog of horrors detailed in the autobiography “Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing” – a stunningly candid account in which he revealed for the first time the years of addiction he endured during the representation of the wise man. the crass, hopelessly romantic Chandler Bing in Friends.
This role eventually earned him around $1 million per episode and made him one of the highest-paid actors in the world.
But for Perry, fame came at an extremely high price, not least the $9 million he estimates he spent staying sober.
He is estimated to have made around 6,000 visits to Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as being in rehab 15 times and undergoing 12 surgeries to save his life.
For Perry, fame came at an extremely high price, not least the $9 million he estimates he spent staying sober – pictured in September 2021 (left)
Perry revealed the intimate details of his battle with substance abuse in his upcoming memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
At one point, his excessive lifestyle caused his gums to become so diseased that his upper front teeth fell out when he bit into peanut butter-slathered toast, and he carried them to the dentist in a plastic bag.
He insists he never showed up to the Friends set high or drunk, but admits you can tell what he was consuming by his physical appearance on screen.
During the show’s production, which ran between 1994 and 2004, Perry weighed between 9 and 2 pounds and 16 and 1 pound. When he was thin, it was painkillers.
When he carried weight, it was alcohol, and he often showed up to filming hungover.
Once, during a scene at the iconic Central Perk Coffee Shop, he passed out on the famous orange couch and co-star Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey, had to shake him awake to say his lines.
On another occasion, Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer, called him out on his drinking and told him “in a strange but loving way” that “we can smell it.”
The confrontation with her must have been particularly devastating since, he admits, he had a crush on her from the start of filming, his enthusiasm only dampened by “her deafening disinterest.”
He had more success with Julia Roberts, who appeared briefly in the 1996 sitcom – a global ratings hit at the time – as Susie Moss, Chandler’s girlfriend.
Roberts only agreed to Perry’s request for a cameo if he would write her an essay on quantum physics, which he duly faxed to her the next day.
However, their off-screen romance was short-lived, lasting just two months before Perry called it quits.
“I had always been sure she would break up with me… so rather than face the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
“She might have been thinking about getting involved with a TV guy and now the TV guy was about to break up with her. “I can’t describe the look of confusion on her face.”
Behind this decision and many of his addiction problems lies Perry’s belief that he is “broken, twisted and unlovable.”
He insists he never showed up to the Friends set high or drunk, but admits you can tell what he was consuming by his physical appearance on screen
Julia Roberts only agreed to Perry’s request for a cameo if he would write her an essay on quantum physics, which he duly faxed to her the next day
He attributed these feelings in part to his childhood.
He was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1969 to actor and model John Perry and journalist Suzanne Morrison, a former press secretary to then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
His father abandoned the family when Perry was a baby, leaving him with a lifelong fear of abandonment.
“If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am, you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me,” he wrote.
His drinking began with beer and cheap wine when he was just 14, and by the time he celebrated his 21st birthday he was already showing signs of getting out of control.
That evening he drank seven whiskey cocktails and a bottle of wine before getting into a stranger’s car after mistaking it for a taxi.
He moved to Los Angeles to pursue his childhood dream of stardom and appeared on several television shows before successfully auditioning for Friends.
The six-member regular cast got along well from the start and their long-standing friendship off camera was undoubtedly an important factor in their chemistry on set, but Perry still found filming to be extremely stressful.
“I felt like I would die if the live audience didn’t laugh,” he admitted at the 2021 reunion show.
“And I was sweating and getting cramps. ‘That’s how I felt every night.’
The show’s enormous success and subsequent paparazzi attention to the six previously relatively unknown actors led to “every single moment of our lives being publicly documented for all to see forever.”
This did not help Perry’s drinking more and more, and he also developed an addiction to Vicodin, a painkiller he took following a jet ski accident shortly after joining the show.
The maximum daily dose is eight tablets, but by the end of the third season of Friends he was swallowing about 55 a day.
Finding more pills became a full-time job: making calls, seeing doctors, faking migraines, finding corrupt nurses to give me what I needed.
“It’s tiring, but you have to do it or you’ll get very sick,” he told the New York Times at the time.
“I didn’t do it to get high or to feel good.” I definitely wasn’t a partygoer. I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It’s not that anymore.’
Matthew Perry detailed his struggles with addiction, fame and life in his memoir
At one point, Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer, called him out on his drinking, and told him “in a strange but loving way” that “we can smell it.”
Sometimes Perry would go to the “open houses” that American real estate agents held to show a property, just so he could steal pills from the medicine cabinets.
In 1995, a former girlfriend, with whom he was still friends, insisted that he see a doctor about his addiction.
This led to the first of many stints in rehab. But as soon as he left, he knew he would be drinking again – just nine weeks before he would reach for the bottle again.
“The addiction wakes up before you do it,” he says, “and it wants you to be alone.” As soon as you raise your hand and say, “I have a problem,” the alcoholic scoffs, “Do you want to say something about that? ?” Fine, I’m going away for a while. But I will come again.’ It never goes away forever.’
Perry attributed his survival in part to the support he received from his inseparable Friends co-stars, describing how they ate every meal together and played poker between scenes.
“They were understanding and patient,” he said in an interview with People magazine last week.
“It’s like penguins.” When one is sick, the other penguins surround him and support him until the penguin can walk on his own. That’s exactly what the cast did for me.”
Between takes, at the request of cardio enthusiasts Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, he hopped on the exercise bike backstage and cycled furiously to get his hungover brain into overdrive. But there was no escaping his addiction.
“I didn’t know how to stop,” he told People at the time.
“If the police came to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail,’ I would start packing.” I couldn’t stop because the disease and addiction are progressive. Therefore, it gets worse as you get older.’
When Perry began filming “Almost Heroes,” a comedy directed by Christopher Guest, in the summer of 1996, he was barely eating—a full stomach seemed to get in the way of the “high.”
He says he also vomited regularly and kept two towels next to the toilet, one to wipe up the vomit and the other “to wipe away the tears.”
Perry explains that he has always drawn the line when it comes to heroin use, especially after his esteemed co-star Chris Farley – a comedian best known for US TV sketch show Saturday Night Live – was known to use the drug – died of an overdose at the age of 33 in 1997.
It’s a decision Perry credits with saving his life. But his problems got so bad that he eventually had to have a “sober companion” – a person who helps addicts recover – accompany him to the Friends set.
That hardly made any difference. Once, while drinking and taking medication the night before filming, he began to lose his words during a playthrough.
“Everyone asked me if I was OK, but no one wanted to stop the Friends train because it was making so much money,” he writes.
“My greatest joy was also my greatest nightmare. ‘I came so close to screwing up something wonderful.’
He was at a particularly low ebb while filming one of Friends’ most anticipated scenes – Chandler’s wedding to Monica, which aired in 2001.
He describes it as “the iconic moment of the iconic show” and reveals that after he finished filming for the day, he was picked up by a sober companion in a pickup truck and driven back to the rehab center where he was staying at the time.
Hit series: Perry pictured with co-star Courteney Cox in an episode of Friends
Two years later, he co-starred with Elizabeth Hurley in the romantic comedy Serving Sara while on methadone (the heroin substitute also used to wean people off Vicodin) and the anxiety medication a pint and a half of vodka a day.
He came to film a scene, but then discovered that it had already been filmed a few days before.
Production was halted while he was in rehab and a breach of contract forced producers to charge him around half a million pounds. The film was a flop.
Although he has had various film and television roles since the final season of Friends aired in May 2004, he is always identified with his role as Chandler Bing – perhaps because they had so much in common.
“I was Chandler,” he writes, explaining that both he and his most famous character use humor to compensate for their insecurities and that they also share relationship fears and self-sabotaging behavior.
The difference, as the LA Times pointed out, is that Chandler finds happiness by marrying Monica and adopting her twins.
In contrast, Perry describes how much he regrets that his drug and alcohol abuse has cost him relationships.
After short-lived romances with actresses like Scream star Neve Campbell, The Hangover’s Heather Graham and Baywatch star Yasmine Bleeth, it seemed like he had finally found happiness when he married 29-year-old literary agent Molly Hurwitz in November 2020 He proposed marriage to his girlfriend of two years.
However, the relationship ended seven months later when a close friend of Hurwitz told American celebrity gossip magazine In Touch: “You can only help someone so much.” He is in really bad shape and his friends fear he may have relapsed. “