Matthew Perry had dozens of life-saving operations, 15 trips to rehab clinics and spent $9 million trying to get clean as he struggled with drugs and alcohol.
Perry died aged 54 ‘after drowning in his jacuzzi at home,’ sources said on Saturday although no drugs were found on scene and there was no indication of foul play.
Law enforcement sources said the actor was discovered at his Los Angeles abode after first responders were called to the scene for a ‘cardiac arrest.’
Perry previously detailed his battle with drug and alcohol addiction in tell-all autobiography Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing, released in November last year.
He described the moment his loved ones raced to the Los Angeles hospital where they were told the then 49-year-old had only a 2 per cent chance of surviving the night, doctors were preparing to connect the Friends star to a machine nicknamed the ‘Hail Mary.’
Used to mechanically oxygenate the blood so that the heart and lungs can rest and heal, it is considered a last resort.
Perry, was in need of desperate measures thanks to his years of drug abuse, heavy drinking and dependence on powerful painkillers.
On that touch-and-go night in 2018, his addiction to opioids had left him with pneumonia and a burst colon.
Shortly after being admitted to hospital he slipped into a coma, which would last two weeks.
When he came round he discovered he had been fitted with the colostomy bag he had to wear for the next nine months.
Matthew Perry (pictured in September 2021), 54, was found dead after drowning at his LA home Saturday. No drugs were found on scene, but he spent decades batting with drink and drugs addiction
DailyMail.com pictured Matthew Perry in Los Angeles October 12 2022 as he stepped out for a relaxing afternoon. He died aged 54 ‘after drowning in his jacuzzi at home’ Saturday
Perry was pictured in Los Angeles February 7 2023 as he oversaw the delivery of furniture at his new Los Angeles hideaway
The actor became an international sensation practically over night after he landed the role as Chandler Bing in Friends in 1994. Pictured with co-star Courtney Cox
Yet even this was not enough to keep him sober.
Two years later his heart stopped beating for five minutes after doctors at a luxury rehab facility in Switzerland administered a sedative which interacted with the opioids in his ravaged body.
They managed to resuscitate him but broke eight ribs in the process, forcing him to pull out of a role alongside Meryl Streep in the film Don’t Look Up.
Perry described that lost opportunity as ‘heartbreaking,’ but the consequences of his addictions have gone way beyond a single missed movie role.
Those two near-death experiences are just part of the catalogue of horror detailed in autobiography Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing — an astonishingly frank account in which he revealed for the first time the years of addiction he hid while portraying the wise-cracking, hopelessly romantic Chandler Bing in Friends.
That role eventually earned him around $1 million per episode, making him one of the best-paid actors in the world.
But for Perry, fame came at an extremely high price, not least the $9 million he reckons he has spent on trying to remain sober.
Estimating that he made some 6,000 visits to Alcoholics Anonymous, he was also in rehab 15 times and underwent 12 operations to save his life.
For Perry, fame came at an extremely high price, not least the $9 million he reckons he has spent on trying to remain sober – pictured in September 2021, (left)
Perry was pictured when he attended a game the 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Crypto.com Arena on April 29, 2023 in Los Angeles, California
Perry was pictured when he attended the 2023 French Open at Roland Garros on June 09, 2023 in Paris, France
Perry attended the 2022 US Open in the Flushing neighborhood, Queens, New York, on September 10 2022
At one point, his gums were so diseased from his debauched lifestyle that his top front teeth fell out as he bit into toast spread with peanut butter, and he found himself carrying them to the dentist in a plastic bag.
He insisted he never turned up to the Friends set while high or drunk, but admits that you can tell what he was using from his physical on-screen appearance.
While making the show, which ran between 1994 and 2004, Perry’s weight varied from 9st 2lb to 16st 1lb. If he was skinny, it was painkillers.
If he was carrying weight, it was drink, and there were many times when he turned up for filming hungover.
Once, during a scene in the iconic Central Perk coffee shop, he passed out on the famous orange couch and co-star Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey, had to nudge him awake to say his line.
On another occasion, Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and called him out for his drinking, telling him ‘in a weird but loving way’ that ‘we can smell it’.
To be confronted by her must have been particularly devastating because, as he admits, he was ‘crushing badly’ on her from the moment filming began, his ardor cooled only by ‘her deafening lack of interest’.
He had more success with Julia Roberts, who in 1996 appeared briefly in the sitcom — by then a global ratings hit — as Susie Moss, Chandler’s girlfriend.
Roberts agreed to Perry’s request for a cameo only if he’d write her a paper on quantum physics, which he duly faxed to her the next day.
Their off-screen romance was brief, though, lasting only two months before Perry ended it.
‘I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me… so instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.
‘She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.’
Behind this decision, and indeed many of his problems with addiction, laid Perry’s conviction that he is ‘broken, bent, unlovable’.
Perry laid bare the intimate details of his battle with substance abuse in his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
He insists he never turned up to the Friends set while high or drunk, but admits that you can tell what he was using from his physical on-screen appearance
Julia Roberts agreed to Perry’s request for a cameo only if he’d write her a paper on quantum physics, which he duly faxed to her the next day
He traced these feelings in part to his childhood.
Born in 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he was the son of actor and model John Perry and journalist Suzanne Morrison, a former press secretary to the then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
His father left the family when Perry was a baby, leaving him with a lifelong fear of abandonment.
‘If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am, you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me,’ he wrote.
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His drinking began with beer and cheap wine when he was only 14 years old, and by his 21st birthday party it was already showing signs of being out of control.
That night, he knocked back seven whisky cocktails and a bottle of wine before getting into the back of a stranger’s car after mistaking it for a cab.
Moving to Los Angeles to pursue his childhood dream of stardom, he appeared in several television shows before successfully auditioning for Friends.
The six-strong regular cast hit it off from the start, and their enduring friendship off camera was undoubtedly a big feature in the chemistry on set, but Perry still found filming hugely stressful.
‘I felt like I was gonna die if the live audience didn’t laugh,’ he admitted on the reunion show in 2021.
‘And I would sweat and just, like, go into convulsions. I felt like that every night.’
The enormous success of the show and the subsequent paparazzi attention for the six previously relatively unknown actors meant ‘every single moment of our lives being documented in public for all to see for ever’.
This did not help with Perry’s increasingly heavy drinking, and he also developed an addiction to Vicodin, a painkiller he took following a jet-ski accident soon after he joined the show.
The maximum daily dosage is eight tablets but, by the end of the third season of Friends, he was swallowing around 55 a day.
The search for more pills became a ‘full-time job: making calls, seeing doctors, faking migraines, finding crooked nurses who would give me what I needed.
‘It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very sick,’ he told the New York Times at the time.
‘I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer. I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.’
Matthew Perry detailed his battle with addiction, fame, and life in his memoir
On one occasion, Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and called him out for his drinking, telling him ‘in a weird but loving way’ that ‘we can smell it’
Sometimes Perry would go to the ‘open houses’ held by American estate agents to showcase a property, just so he could steal pills from the medicine cabinets.
In 1995, a former girlfriend with whom he was still friendly insisted he see a doctor about his addictions.
This led to the first of many stints in rehab. But even as he left, he knew he was going to drink again — lasting only nine weeks before once again hitting the bottle.
‘Addiction wakes up before you do,’ he says, ‘and it wants you alone. As soon as you raise your hand and say: ‘I’m having a problem,’ alcohol sneers: ‘You’re gonna say something about it? Fine, I’ll go away for a while. But I’ll be back.’ It never goes away for good.’
Perry attributed his survival, in part, to the support he got from his inseparable Friends co-stars, describing how they ate every meal together and played poker in between scenes.
‘They were understanding and they were patient,’ he said in an interview with People magazine last week.
‘It’s like penguins. When one is sick, the other penguins surround it and prop it up until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.’
Between takes, he’d get on the exercise bike installed backstage at the request of cardio-enthusiasts Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox, and cycle furiously in a bid to get his hungover brain firing on all cylinders. But there was no escaping his addictions.
‘I didn’t know how to stop,’ he told People at the time.
‘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.’
By the summer of 1996, when Perry began filming Almost Heroes, a comedy directed by Christopher Guest, he was hardly ever eating — a full stomach seemed to get in the way of the ‘high’.
He says he was also throwing up regularly, keeping two towels next to the lavatory, one for wiping up the vomit, the other ‘to wipe away the tears’.
Perry explains that he has always drawn the line at taking heroin, especially after his cherished co-star Chris Farley — a comedian best known for U.S. TV sketch show Saturday Night Live who was known to use the drug — died of an overdose aged 33 in 1997.
He insists he never turned up to the Friends set while high or drunk, but admits that you can tell what he was using from his physical on-screen appearance
He was at a particularly low ebb when he filmed one of Friends’ most-anticipated scenes — Chandler’s wedding to Monica, which aired in 2001
It’s a choice Perry credits with saving his life. But his problems got so bad that he eventually had to have a ‘sober companion’ — a person who helps addicts in their recovery — accompany him to the Friends set.
This made little difference. Once, when he had been drinking the night before filming and was also on medication, he began slurring his words during a run-through.
‘Everyone would ask me if I was all right, but no one wanted to stop the Friends train because it was such a money-maker,’ he writes.
‘My greatest joy was also my biggest nightmare. I was this close to messing up a wonderful thing.’
He was at a particularly low ebb when he filmed one of Friends’ most-anticipated scenes — Chandler’s wedding to Monica, which aired in 2001.
Describing it as ‘the iconic moment on the iconic show’, he reveals that after shooting had finished for the day, he was collected by a sober companion in a pick-up truck and driven back to the rehab center where he was then staying.
Hit series: Perry pictured with co-star Courteney Cox on an episode of Friends
Two years later, he co-starred in the rom-com Serving Sara with Elizabeth Hurley, while using methadone (the heroin substitute also used to wean people off Vicodin), along with the anxiety medication Xanax and cocaine, all washed down with around a pint-and-a-half of vodka a day.
He turned up to film one scene, only to realise it had already been shot a few days earlier.
The production closed down while he went to rehab, and a breach of contract saw him billed for around half a million pounds by the producers. The film was a flop.
Although he’s had various movie and TV roles since the final season of Friends aired in May 2004, his role as Chandler Bing is the one with which he will always be identified — perhaps because they had so much in common.
‘I was Chandler,’ he writes, explaining that both he and his most famous character use humor to compensate for their insecurities, and they also share relationship anxieties and self-sabotaging behaviour.
The difference, as the LA Times has pointed out, is that Chandler finds happiness, marrying Monica and adopting their twins.
Perry, by contrast, describes how deeply he regrets how his drug and alcohol abuse have cost him relationships.
Following short-lived romances with actresses including Scream star Neve Campbell, The Hangover’s Heather Graham and Yasmine Bleeth, who starred in Baywatch, it seemed as though he had finally found happiness when, in November 2020, he proposed to literary agent Molly Hurwitz, 29, his girlfriend of two years.
However, the relationship ended seven months later, with a close friend of Hurwitz’s telling the American celebrity gossip magazine In Touch: ‘You can only help someone so much. He is in a really dark place and pals fear he may have relapsed.’
