Matthew Perry turns 54 today, but he won't be celebrating by firing up some old clips of his standout role as Chandler Bing, as there's a heartbreaking reason he refuses to watch Friends.
Perry spent 10 years on the beloved sitcom, but while fans were guffawing over the iconic 'Pivot!' scene and swooned over Chandler's love story with Courteney Cox's Monica, Perry was privately struggling with substance abuse.
His co-star Lisa Kudrow told The New York Times in 2002: "Hard doesn’t even begin to describe it.
"When Matthew was sick, it was not fun. We were just hopelessly standing on the sidelines. We were hurting a lot.
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"Matthew is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. He’s charming and hilarious.
"Most of our hard laughs came from Matthew."
Matt LeBlanc also told People in 2002 about Perry's struggles while filming Friends.
He said: "I tried to talk to him. There wasn’t a response. It’s such a personal struggle; they need to bottom out on their own."
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Last year, while promoting his memoir Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing, Perry revealed the reason why he never revisits his performance as Chandler.
He told CBC: "I didn’t watch the show, and haven’t watched the show, because I could go, 'Drinking, opiates, drinking, cocaine'.
"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."
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Recalling on particularly bad hangover he experienced while on set, Perry said he struggled to stand up straight.
"At one point I was shaking so much that if I was gonna go from the bookshelf to the table, I’d have to quickly do it and put my hand on the table so I wouldn’t shake," he said. "It got that bad.”
Speaking to People, Perry revealed that his alcoholism was just taking root when he landed the role that would change his life on the astronomically popular sitcom.
Over the years on the show, his addiction escalated - and in 2018, it nearly cost him his life.
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While Perry publicly said he had been hospitalised for a gastrointestinal perforation, the truth was that his colon had burst from using opioids.
He was hospitalised for a total of five months, two weeks of which he was in a coma.
He said: "The doctors told my family that I had a two percent chance to live."
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Perry has been sober since 2021, and is hopefully today celebrating another year of being happier and healthier than during his time on Friends.
Topics: Film and TV, Friends, Drugs, Mental Health, Health, Celebrity
Simon Fearn