This ‘Friends’ Co-Star Was the First to Reach Out to Matthew Perry During His Active Addiction
They weren't just friends on television.
Matthew Perry has been very transparent about his history of addiction—and its aftermath—while promoting his upcoming memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
The Friends star sat down with Diane Sawyer for an interview that aired last night, Oct. 28, ahead of the book's release this Tuesday, Nov. 1, where the two dug deep about everything from his very first drink to what first led him to seek treatment to his health today.
During the conversation, the two, of course, talked about his time on the hit sitcom series, and how addiction affected his work. For example, the actor pointed out his weight fluctuation from season to season, and how you could tell whether he was drinking alcohol or taking pills based on his appearance. At one point, while working on the film Serving Sara, Perry was so intoxicated that he had to go back and dub his lines because his speech was so slurred.
He was never the first to admit to his addiction. He said he couldn't tell anyone "because they would possibly tell [him] to stop," and he felt he could never forgive himself if he messed anything up.
But his Friends castmates caught on. It was one of them that reached out to him first, and most frequently: Jennifer Aniston.
"Imagine how scary a moment that was," Perry said of the first time Anniston called him and said, "We know you were drinking." He thought he was hiding it, but the rest of them could smell the liquor.
At the time, Perry wasn't in a place where he was able to address his addiction, but he says now, "I'm really grateful to her for that."
Later, several members of not only the cast but the crew filed into his dressing room
"What are you doing?" they asked. "Why are you acting this way?" They told him they knew something was going on, that there was a problem, though Perry found an excuse for it and promised it wouldn't happen again.
He then, in an excerpt from the memoir, compared the group to penguins. "In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it's better," he wrote. "This is what my costars on Friends did for me." While he did not go further into it during the interview, the paragraph continued into a story of arriving to set hungover. He wrote that Aniston and Courteney Cox believed in cardio as a "cure-all," and had a stationary bike installed for him, which he frequently used to "get [his] brain power back to normal."
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