Now this doesn’t sound like one of Chandler’s funny stories at all. Friends star Matthew Perry has said he was on the brink of death after his colon burst from drug abuse. The 53-year-old actor, who played the funny and sarcastic Chandler Bing on the popular sitcom, has opened up about the role – as well as the substance and alcohol problems that have dogged his career – in a new autobiography. Here’s what he has to say.
In an interview with People magazine, Perry said he waited until now to share the extreme depths of his addiction because he wanted to make sure he is “safe from going into the dark side of everything again.”
Matthew Perry Says He Was On The Brink Of Death
He opens his book, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, with the revelation he almost died a few years ago aged 49, the outlet said. After his colon burst from opioid abuse, he spent two weeks in a coma and five months in hospital and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.
He said: “The doctors told my family that I had a 2% 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.”
Perry said five people were put on Ecmo machines that night and only he survived, making him question why he was the one. He said his alcohol addiction began to surface when he was first cast on Friends aged 24. By the end of the 10th series of the hit show, he became “entrenched in a lot of trouble”.
He said there were years when he was sober while filming and that his fellow cast members had been “understanding” and “patient” with him when he was going through difficult times.
“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,” he said. “They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
At one point during his time on Friends, which ran from 1994-2004, Perry said he was taking 55 Vicodin painkillers a day. He said: “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.”
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