Friends star Matthew Perry has opened up about his time on the set of the iconic TV show and how he can’t watch himself back because of what he went through…
The actor revealed it was painful to revisit those moments on screen.
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Now, we were first introduced to the Friends gang in 1994.
Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey burst onto our screens in September 1994.
It was an instant hit.
The comedy followed the friends, who live in the same New York apartment block, as they navigated through their mid-twenties.
We got to know the ins and outs of their everyday life…
And in a way, they became our own friends… It’s corny, but it’s true.
The show navigated some serious topics…
Ross and Rachel were not on a break. Period.
There were many iconic moments throughout the show’s ten seasons.
Rachel’s English trifle, Chandler’s nubbin, the time Joey got a Thanksgiving turkey stuck on his head…
The list could go on.
Despite the show coming to an end in 2004, it stands as one of the most-watched shows on Netflix, and its fanbase is as strong as ever.
They all embodied their characters completely.
And none of us can quite see them in anything else.
The gang earned a lot of money during those 10 years…
Allegedly, the cast was each on an eye-watering $1 million salary per episode in the later seasons of the show – a history-breaking figure.
Despite everyone’s love for the show, behind the scenes, one of the actors was struggling immensely to stay afloat.
Matthew Perry, who played the lovable Chandler Bing, has opened up about struggling with addiction while he was filming the show.
Perry has spilled all in his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which is coming out on November 1.
“I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again,” he told PEOPLE.
“I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober — and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction — to write it all down.
“And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people.”
In his memoir, Perry admits that he almost died at the age of forty-nine after his colon burst from using opioids.
He shared that while he was being treated in hospital, “the doctors told my family that I had a 2 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.”
Perry revealed that he first began with an alcohol addiction aged twenty-four while working on Friends, which slowly turned into drug use.
“I could handle it, kind of. But by the time I was 34, I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble,” he admitted.
“But there were years that I was sober during that time. Season 9 was the year that I was sober the whole way through. And guess which season I got nominated for best actor? I was like, ‘That should tell me something.'”
And after being admitted to rehab fifteen times over the years, Perry revealed that he’s sober and feeling a lot healthier.
He has also learned a lot: “It’s important, but if you lose your sobriety, it doesn’t mean you lose all that time and education,” he said. “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.”
And while he’s been through a lot over the years, Perry is incredibly grateful to be here to tell his story and help others.
“I’m an extremely grateful guy. I’m grateful to be alive, that’s for sure. And that gives me the possibility to do anything.”
In an exclusive look at the trailer for his interview with Diane Sawyer, airing Oct. 28, Matthew Perry opens up about his struggles with addiction—and which Friends co-star helped the most.
He reveals that in the height of his addiction, he was taking ”55 Vicodin a day,” alongside the ”Methadone, Xanax, a full quart of vodka a day” mentioned by Sawyer.
Perry also tells Sawyer that he was in a coma ”and escaped death really narrowly.”
He goes into more depth about this in his upcoming memoir.
He recalls the moment that his friends co-star Jennifer Aniston, whom he calls ‘Jenny,’ once confronted him about his struggles.
”We know you’re drinking,” she said.
”Imagine how scary a moment that was,” Perry tells Sawyer.
He describes Aniston’s support as crucial, and that she played a huge part in his journey to recovery.
He explains that “she was the one that reached out the most, I’m really grateful to her for that.”
During his interview with People, Perry noted that his co-stars in the Friends cast — Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow, and David Schwimmer — were all also supportive. He describes them as “understanding” and “patient.”
But it seems he had a deeper connection with Aniston than the rest.
In an extract of his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing published in The Times, Perry opened up about his friendship with Aniston.
And how he wanted to be more than friends.
“I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued too – maybe it was going to be something,” he said.
When Perry got the call that he’d got the role of Chandler, he immediately rang her, telling her: “‘You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to.’
“Bad idea,” he wrote. “I could feel ice forming through the phone. Looking back, it was clear that this made her think I liked her too much or in the wrong kind of way… and I only compounded the error by then asking her out.
“She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, ‘We can’t be friends!’”
Perry admitted that although he still liked Aniston, they were “able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact that we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer” on the hit sitcom.
He continued: “Fairly early in the making of Friends I realized that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston. Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. And then I’d ask myself, how long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?
“But that shadow disappeared in the hot glow of the show. (That, and her deafening lack of interest.)”
Perry admitted that he was not enraged after he found out something about his co-stars, Aniston and David Schwimmer.
While talking about Aniston on The Jess Cagle Show, Perry said that he felt like he’d never get a chance to be with her…
But admitted that he had accepted it.
“At first it was like, she would walk in, I’d be like, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ And I’d go to my dressing room and just go, ‘Oh, I’ll never, I’ll never be able to be with her.
“But how can you not have a crush on Jennifer Aniston, you know? But I did at one point just go, ‘All right, that’s enough,'” he said.
But that’s not all…
Co-host Julia Cunningham questioned whether Perry was “seething” when Aniston and Schwimmer admitted to having feelings for one another during the reunion.
During the Friends reunion, Schwimmer confessed: “The first season, we — I had a major crush on Jen,” to which Aniston responded and said: “It was reciprocated.”
Schwimmer then added: “At some point, we were both crushing hard on each other. But it was like two ships passing because one of us was always in a relationship. So and we never crossed that boundary. We respected that.”
Cunningham asked Perry: “I was like, ‘Was Matthew seething with anger on the set of the reunion hearing about this unrequited love?'”
“Oh, I knew. I knew. Yeah, no, I knew what was going on. And eventually, my crush dissipated,” he admitted.
Perry has also opened up about one of the most watched moments in the entirety of Friends.
In his memoir, Perry shared that he felt “dead inside” while shooting the finale.
The final episode saw the Friends cast part ways while Monica and Chandler hand in their keys to the iconic Manhattan apartment for the last time.
In his book, Perry wrote: “It was January 23, 2004, the keys on the counter, a guy who looked a lot like Chandler Bing said, ‘Where?’”
“‘Embryonic Journey’ by Jefferson Airplane played, the camera panned to the back of the apartment door, then Ben, our first AD, and very close friend, shouted for the last time, ‘That’s a wrap,’ and tears sprang from almost everyone’s eyes like so many geysers,” he added.
But the momentous moment left Perry feeling emotionally numb.
“We had made 237 episodes, including this last one, called, appropriately enough, ‘The Last One.’ Jennifer Aniston was sobbing — after a while, I was amazed she had any water left in her entire body. Even Matt LeBlanc was crying,” he said. “But I felt nothing.”
“I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside,” Perry continued.
“So, instead of sobbing, I took a slow walk around the stage with my then-girlfriend — also appropriately called Rachel — stage 24 at Warner Bros. in Burbank (a stage that after the show ended would be renamed ‘The Friends Stage’).
“We said our various goodbyes, agreeing to see each other soon in the way that people do when they know it’s not true, and then we headed out to my car,” he revealed.
And Perry has recently shared in an interview with CBC, that he can’t re-watch past episodes because he was so “brutally thin.”
He admitted he “can’t watch the show back” because he can tell what addiction he was struggling with in each season.
“I weighed 128 lbs, I was on Friends getting watched by 30 million people — and that’s why I can’t watch the show, ‘cause I was brutally thin,” he said.
“I didn’t watch the show, and haven’t watched the show, because I could go, drinking, o******, drinking, c******,” he added.
“I could tell season by season by how I looked. That’s why I don’t wanna watch it, because that’s what I see.”
Perry shared that he found the whole thing “unfair.”
“You know, the thing that always makes me cry — and I hope I don’t cry here — is that it’s not fair. It’s not, it’s not fair,” he said.
“It’s not fair that I had to go through this disease while the other five didn’t. They got everything that I got, but I had to fight this thing — and still have to fight this thing,” the actor added.
What do you make of his comments?