Friends’ Monica And Chandler Wedding Scene Turned Out To Be a Tragedy In Real Life
Fans didn’t know that during the filming of one of the happiest moments in the series, one of the actors was in a very dark place in his life.
The One with Monica and Chandler's Wedding, which aired in 2001, is one of the most popular episodes of Friends. The wedding doesn't go as planned: after the rehearsal, Chandler gets scared of the wedding and runs away, leaving a note: "Tell Monica I'm sorry."
Things get complicated when Phoebe finds a positive pregnancy test in the bathroom and thinks it's Monica's. Everything that could possibly go wrong does go wrong, but the characters still get their happy endings.
Chandler returns because he loves Monica and even willing to raise their future children (but here's the surprise, it's not his wife who's pregnant).
However, few viewers know that Matthew Perry was struggling with a serious addiction at the time, which reached its peak on the set of such an important event for his character.
As soon as the scene was shot and the cameras turned off, the actor was immediately taken to a rehabilitation center:
“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center – at the height of my highest point in Friends, the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”
According to Perry, his addiction to pills and alcohol greatly affected his appearance during the filming of the series – if you compare his weight from season to season, you can see the trend.
When he gained weight, he drank a lot of alcohol, and when he lost weight, he took a lot of pills. At the same time, the actor says that he never worked on the set drunk, but it happened that he was hungover.
So, Matthew admitted that because of his addiction, he simply does not remember anything from the third to the sixth season of Friends.
The ninth season of the show was the only one in which Perry was completely sober and received his only Emmy nomination for his role on Friends. In his memoir, the actor repeatedly thanks his partners for supporting him during the most difficult time of his life.
Source: The New York Times