"So much has been written about me in the past. I thought it was time people heard it from me"- Mathew Perry.
Mathew Perry, friends tv star, finally releases his autobiography on November 1st, 2022. The friends star titles it ‘friends, lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing’. In this book he talks about his struggles with addiction with alcohol and drugs while also taking a step away from the big screen. On the TV show ‘friends’ you can’t see that he is struggling with addition due to his mask of being the ‘funny and sarcastic’ friend on the TV show. The series ran from 1994-2004, all the way through the series he struggles with his addiction and towards the end of the series you can see he is really struggling, and he doesn’t play his character properly, the funny sarcastic Chandler we knew turned into the quiet character. Mathew thought he was hiding it so well on set but on an interview, he says that co-star Jenifer Aniston tells him that they can smell it on him, however he proceeds to say he was in no state to stop the drinking. All his friends were supportive and there for him during the filming of ‘friends’.
In Mathews autobiography he tells us that you can see the addiction due to his weight from season to season, he quotes “you can track the trajectory for my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season. When I’m carrying my weight its alcohol; when I’m skinny its pills, when I have a goatee, its lots of pills”. If you’re a fan of friends you can see the change in Mathew’s character from season 1-10, the changes in his body and face. Perry says his weight fluctuated between 128 pounds-225 pounds whilst filming friends. Sometimes the star would come in and film the series hungover, he says he feels sorry for that person but its him and he doesn’t know what was going off. During the filming of season 3 he was involved in a jet ski accident which resulted to his addiction to Vicodin, a prescription painkiller that’s supposed to treat moderate to severe pain. Following onto this, Mathews admits that there were sometimes where he was sober such as he was sober all the way through season 9 and that’s the same year he got voted for best actor and he thought “that should tell me something”.
Publicly acknowledging at the time that he suffered from gastrointestinal perforation, the actor had actually spent weeks fighting for his life after his colon burst from opioid overuse. He spent 2 weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months. When he was admitted to the hospital, he had a 2% chance to live and he was put on a ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. Before releasing the autobiography, he says “so much has been written about me in the past. I thought it was time people heard from me. The highs were high and the lows were low. But I have lived to tell the tale, even though at times it looked like I wouldn’t, and its all in here”.
- By Honey Sherwood
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