Matthew Perry has not had an easy and glamorous life since he and his fellow “Friends” stopped taping their iconic NBC hit comedy in 2004. Rock bottom, undoubtedly, occurred in 2018, when the actor almost died at the age of 49 when his colon burst due to an addiction and overdose on opioids.
He was in a coma for two months and spent five months in the hospital as he took a long hard road to recovery.
Now, the fan favorite who played Chandler Bing on Friends has a new book called “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” that comes out November 1 and sheds the spotlight on his troubles.
How bad was it for Perry? Here’s what he told People Magazine in a cover story that hits newsstands now.
“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.”
Amazingly, Perry did. The details about his drug and addiction troubles are detailed in the book. He told People that he started drinking heavily in the early 90s and things progressed.
“I could handle it, kind of. But by the time I was 34, I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble. But there were years that I was sober during that time.” The sitcom’s penultimate season 9, circa 2002, “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.'”
The opioids he was hooked on controlled his life. He said that at one point, he took 55 Vicodins in a single day. His weight fell under 130 pounds, and he was utterly hooked on pills and booze.
He said he has been to rehab roughly 15 times, and now he claims he’s “pretty healthy.”
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