I loved Friends and fancied Jennifer… but I was battling demons & didn’t know how to stop, says Matthew Perry in memoir
IT was almost a year ago to the day that Matthew Perry released his extraordinary memoir, laying bare his crippling battle with drugs and alcohol – and his secret crush on Jennifer Aniston.
After decades of struggles, including a terrifying brush with death in 2018, he spoke about how grateful he is to be alive, and his pride in “bouncing back from all this torture”.
It makes the Friends star’s sudden death at his Los Angeles home on Saturday, aged just 54, all the more tragic.
In the book, Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing, he told how at his darkest point, he was drinking two pints of vodka and popping 55 pills a day.
His dependency on methadone, cocaine and tranquiliser Xanax resulted in 15 rehab stints, 30 years of therapy and more than 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — much of which went on while he was filming Friends.
He wrote: “Even though it’s a little scary to tell all your secrets in a book, I didn’t leave anything out. Everything’s in there.”
Matthew was 24 when he won the role of Chandler Bing in the hit sitcom, which premiered in 1994.
On reading the script he felt the character was tailor-made for him, joking it was as if someone had followed him around for a year, stealing his jokes and copying his mannerisms and “world-weary yet witty view of life”.
Three weeks before his audition, he prayed: “God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.”
‘Julia was slumming it’
Matthew recalled sitting down with the cast for the first time — and spotting a familiar face.
He had met Jennifer, who played Rachel Green, three years earlier through mutual friends, and admitted he had been “immediately taken with her”.
When he asked her out, she gave him the brush-off, but said she would love to be friends, to which he exclaimed: “We can’t be friends!”
He wrote: “Now, a few years later, ironically we were friends.
“Fortunately, even though I was still attracted to her and thought she was so great, that first day we were able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer.”
Friends was an instant hit, and Matthew suddenly found himself with a bevy of admirers — including Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts.
They faxed each other for three months before meeting, and began dating around the time she made a cameo in a 1995 Friends episode.
But Matthew broke things off after just two months, fearing he would “never be enough” for her and that she was “slumming it” with him.
In 1996 he briefly dated Baywatch actress Yasmine Bleeth — who Chandler regularly spoke of having a crush on — and also had flings with actress Neve Campbell, Gilmore Girls star Lauren Graham and fashion student Rachel Dunn.
His longest relationship was with Mean Girls actress Lizzy Caplan, lasting from 2006 to 2012 — although they tried to keep their romance private.
The fame that Matthew had so desperately craved as a kid came at a price — and he started drinking heavily soon after.
He wrote: “I loved my co-actors, I loved the scripts, I loved everything about the show. But I was also struggling with my addictions, which only added to my sense of shame.
“I had a secret, and no one could know. And even making the shows could be painful.”
In an interview with ABC News last year, Matthew recalled how Jennifer — who he had “long since gotten over” after she began dating Brad Pitt — challenged him on set one day about his drinking.
He said: “Imagine how scary a moment that was,” but he added: “She was the one that reached out the most.”
Their close bond was evident at the Friends reunion in 2020, where Matthew spoke of his crippling insecurity, admitting he used to feel like he was going to die, or break out in sweats and convulsions if the live audience didn’t laugh at his jokes.
He wrote: “This pressure left me in a bad place, and I also knew that of the six people making that show, only one of them was sick.
“I would give it all up not to feel this way. I think about it all the time. It’s no idle thought, it’s a cold-hearted fact.
“That Faustian prayer I made was a stupid one, the prayer of a child. It was not based on anything real. But it became real.
“I have the money, the recognisability and the near-death experiences to prove it.”
One of those came in 2018 when Matthew’s colon burst — a symptom of his abuse of the opiate OxyContin, which left him on a life support machine with damaged organs.
Matthew told People magazine: “The doctors told my family that I had a two per cent 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.”
Afterwards Matthew spent two weeks in a coma and five months fighting for life in hospital. He had first been prescribed the painkiller Vicodin in 1997, after a jet ski accident, and quickly became reliant on it, even after his injuries healed.
It led to his first stint in rehab, lasting 20 days, but it wasn’t enough to get him clean.
Matthew — who admitted there were three years of filming Friends that he doesn’t remember — tried to hide his condition, but his yo-yoing weight alarmed co-stars and fans.
Stomach operations
By 2001 he was drinking a litre of vodka a day, and he said of his addictions: “I could handle it, kind of. But by the time I was 34 (in 2003), I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble.
“But there were years that I was sober during that time. Season Nine (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’.”
At his worst, Matthew was taking 55 Vicodin tablets a day and weighed just over 9st.
He told People: “I didn’t know how to stop. If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail’, I’d start packing.
“I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”
With the support of his Friends co-stars he attempted to get clean, but suffered numerous relapses.
He said: “They were understanding and they were patient. It’s like penguins.
“Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up.
“They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
Matthew went to rehab 15 times in all. He recalled a stint in 2001 during which he watched his ex Julia Roberts win the Best Actress Oscar on TV, while he was “sweating and twitching, filled with fear”.
He told how he stood up and cried out: “I’ll take you back. I’ll take you back.”
He added: “The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people.
“No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now.”
Last year Matthew said he was “pretty healthy”, and added it was something he was extremely proud of.
He didn’t reveal how long he had been sober, but said he “counted every day” and was spurred on by the harrowing scars from 14 stomach operations which served as a constant reminder.
He said he had written his book to help others suffering from addiction, and added: “There were five people put on an Ecmo machine that night, and the other four died, and I survived.
“So the big question is why? Why was I the one? There has to be some kind of reason.”
In an interview with Canadian broadcaster Tom Power last year, Matthew made what now feels like an eerie premonition.
He said: “The best thing about me, bar none, is that if somebody comes up to me and says, ‘I can’t stop drinking, can you help me?’ I can say yes and follow up and do it.
“When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned, I want that to be the first thing that’s mentioned.”