The rest of the world may have been watching, but one person was decidedly not tuning in to the hit television show Friends—Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing on the long-running sitcom, which aired to massive ratings from 1994 to 2004.
The reason Perry couldn’t watch is actually quite heartbreaking: he revealed in a November 2022 interview that he couldn’t bear to tune in because he “could tell season by season” the stage he was at in his addiction to drugs and alcohol, a struggle that plagued him for nearly 25 years before he became completely sober in May 2021.
“I didn’t watch the show and haven’t watched the show because I could go drinking…opiates…drinking…cocaine,” he said in an interview with “Q with Tom Power” (per People). “Like, I could tell season by season by how I looked. And I don’t think anybody else can, but I certainly could. And that’s why I don’t want to watch it, because that’s what I see, that’s what I noticed when I watch it.”
Perry, whose star turn on Friends happened in his mid-twenties, said of early fame “I could handle it, kind of. But by the time I was 34, I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble.” Of himself in the mid-1990s, he said “He was just a guy desperate for fame, thinking that it would fix everything. Just ‘on’ all the time. It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realized I don’t have to do that, because it’s probably annoying to people. I was 24 when I got [the role], and the disease was just getting started right around then.” At one point during his opioid addiction, Perry said he took 55 Vicodin a day and that his weight plummeted to 128 pounds. “I didn’t know how to stop,” he said. “The disease and the addiction is progressive, so it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”
Perry’s Friends costars rallied around him as he battled addiction during their years of filming, he said: “They were understanding, and they were patient,” he said. “It could be said that [doing the show] saved me.” Perry, who famously earned $1 million per week on the show, said that he would trade his fame and fortune “to not have this disease.”
For viewers of the show, Perry wrote in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing “You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,” he writes. “When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills. By the end of season three, I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get 55 Vicodin a day—I had to have 55 every day, otherwise I’d get so sick.”
Perry said in the book that he had detoxed 65 times, the first time being when he was just 26, in the middle of filming Friends. “If you watch season three of Friends, I hope you’ll be horrified at how thin I am by the end of the season (opioids fuck with your appetite, plus they make you vomit constantly),” he wrote. By the finale of season three, the outfit he wore looked "at least three sizes too big for me.”
Perry implored viewers of the show to compare “how I look between the final episode of season six and the first of season seven—the Chandler-Monica proposal episodes. I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven [it’s supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost 50 pounds in the off-season. My weight varied between 128 pounds and 225 pounds during the years of Friends.”
All this said, Perry said in the interview with Tom Power that he was considering watching the show because of the “incredible” experience of filming alongside castmates Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer: “But I think I’m going to start to watch it because, first of all, it was an incredible ride,” he said. “But it’s been an incredible thing to watch it touch the hearts of different generations. It’s become this important, significant thing and I, you know, I would watch that again. It was really funny and all the people were nice. And I’ve been too worried about this.”
We can only hope Perry got the chance before his tragic death yesterday, in an apparent drowning at his L.A. home. He was just 54 years old.
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