Matthew Perry Was Told He Only Had A Two Percent Chance To Live
Matthew Perry is widely known as Chandler Bing, a funny, notoriously sarcastic, and a bit-insecure character from Friends. He is also the only actor from the main crew who frequently wrote his own jokes.
The admirers of Perry's quick wit have waited long for his own memoir. Now the book called Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir is finally about to hit the bookshelves on November 1. But it doesn't open with the funniest of Perry's jokes. Quite the contrary: in the opening chapter of the memoir Perry tells how he spent weeks fighting for his life after opioid overuse.
Talking to People, Perry explained that he waited to write Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir "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."
In the book, Perry writes, "If you gauge my weight from season to season, — when I'm carrying weight, it's alcohol; when I am skinny, it's pills. When I have a goatee, it's lots of pills."
Back in 2016 Perry confessed that he doesn't remember filming 3 seasons of Friends at all. When asked by the BBC about his least favorite episode of the show, Perry admitted, "Somewhere between season three and six … I was a little out of it."
Perry's struggles with addiction have been addressed before. He publicly admitted it in an interview with People in 2013.
"I had a big problem with alcohol and pills and I couldn't stop," he said. "Eventually things got so bad that I couldn't hide it, and then everybody knew."
In that interview, the actor also claimed that he finally got sober and now was dedicated to helping other addicts. He even turned his former Malibu beach home into a men's sober living facility.
As it turns out that was not the end of Perry's addictions. As Perry recalls in his book, he almost died 4 years ago after his colon burst from opioid overuse. Perry writes that when he was first admitted to the hospital, the doctors told his family that he had a "2 percent chance to live." He spent weeks in coma, months with a colostomy bag, and has been sober ever since.