‘Friends’ star Matthew Perry recently shared about his decades-long battle with substance abuse and how co-star Jennifer Aniston intervened and helped him out as a friend. In the upcoming memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” as well as an interview with Diane Sawyer that will air on ABC on Friday, October 28, all will be revealed about the troubled star.
The 53-year-old revealed about his addiction in a sneak peek of Sawyer’s interview. In a preview clip obtained by E!News, Perry shared that, “Secrets kill you.”
“Secrets kill people like me.”
“At the time I should have been the toast of the town,” he added. “I was in a dark room meeting nothing but drug dealers and completely alone.”
According to Sawyer, Perry’s drugs and booze of choice is “methadone, Xanax, full quart of vodka” including “55 Vicodin a day.”
In the clip, Perry was asked about Aniston, whom he calls Jenny, sharing about the confrontation they had during the time of his addiction.
Sawyer quoted Aniston as saying, “We know you’re drinking.”
“Imagine how scary a moment that was,” Perry responded.
Perry added that Aniston’s support was desperately needed in his recovery journey. “She was the one that reached out the most,” he said, adding, “I’m really grateful to her for that.”
“‘How can you tell?’ I said. I never worked drunk. ‘I’ve been trying to hide it …’”
Elsewhere in the excerpt, Perry mentioned how he “never” worked high or drunk (although he “certainly worked hungover”), and he said he was largely able to function as part of the uber-successful “Friends” ensemble thanks to his castmates and how they would “group around [him] and prop [him] up” like an injured penguin being supported by the other penguins.
“I was the injured penguin, but I was determined to not let these wonderful people, and this show, down,” he wrote.
But that day in Perry’s trailer, Aniston told him plainly that he wasn’t getting away with anything.
“‘We can smell it,’ she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural ‘we’ hit me like a sledgehammer,” Perry wrote.
“‘I know I’m drinking too much,’ I said, ‘but I don’t exactly know what to do about it.’”
The “Whole Nine Yards” star also revealed in the new book how his weight fluctuated wildly due to the pills making him sick and alleviating his appetite, or alcohol causing him to be bloated.
“You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season – 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.”
Perry even referenced specific points in the hit show’s 10-season run and clued readers in to what was going on with his addiction at that time.
“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. It was a full-time job: making calls, seeing doctors, faking migraines, finding crooked nurses who would give me what I needed,” Perry wrote.
The actor recently said he is finally ready to share his experiences now that he is safely on the other side of addiction.
“I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again,” Perry told People of the book. “I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober – and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction – to write it all down. And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people.”
“Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” by Matthew Perry, will be published by Headline on November 1.
Read More News:
‘Rishi Sunak not British’ says ‘racist’ caller on UK show. Host responds