Matthew Perry Refuses to Watch Friends for This Unlikely Reason
A lot of actors hate to watch themselves on screen and most of them just do not re-watch the movies they once starred in. Matthew Perry is no exception. And the Chandler Bing actor has a good reason not to re-watch Friends.
In a recent conversation with Tom Power at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto, the Friends star discussed his book Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, which was released earlier this fall.
In a nutshell, the memoir is about Perry's life-long battle with alcohol and drug addiction.
He admitted to being sober only for one season (Season 9 that is) of the famed series and this is actually the reason why he does not feel like re-watching the popular sitcom.
"I could go drinking, opiates, drinking, cocaine. I could tell season by season by how I looked. That's why I don't want to watch it because that's what I see," the actor told Power. "I can't watch the show cause I was brutally thin," Perry joked.
Speaking about how he started drinking at a young age Perry said it was like a roller coaster ride. He recalled his first time when he had a full bottle of wine and how good he felt afterwards.
"I lay in the ground and looked to the skies and just felt better than I'd ever had in my entire life and I thought to myself – this is probably what normal people feel like all the time. I finally felt at home for the very first time," he told the audience who gathered to listen to his revelations.
Perry said that his reaction was quite unusual because in contrast to ordinary people who would feel "woozy", after having a drink "his life seemed to finally have sense."
He was also open as to what could have potentially become a trigger for his later addiction to drugs. Perry recalled an episode from his childhood, which his parents had shared with him. Being a baby who cried all the time he was shown to a doctor who prescribed him phenobarbital, a very addictive substance, he was given during a span of 30 days.
He does not blame his parents though, because they did what he would probably do himself – go and see a doctor. And back in the 1970s how could you not trust a trained specialist?
The addiction, which Perry tried so hard to fight spending time in rehab almost cost the actor his life as he was once put on life support after taking too many pills. And it was his Friends co-stars – Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow – who helped him realize it was high time he quitted his very bad habit. Matthew Perry has been clean since spring 2021. He admitted in an interview with the New York Times that he spent some $9 million trying to fight the addiction and stay sober.