Actor Matthew Perry is opening up about his years of drug and alcohol addiction. While his career was blowing up as he played Chandler Bing on Friends, he was also dealing with addiction and stints in treatment centers.
Matthew admitted that right after one of the most iconic Friends episodes, especially for his character, he was taken to a treatment center. He explained, “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.”
Matthew Perry opens up about his past drug addiction in his new memoir
The 53-year-old said that his addictions began when he was just 14 years old. He’s chronicling his experiences in a new memoir called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. Matthew revealed, “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer.”
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He continued, “It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”
His own personal hell came when his drug addiction caught up to him. He dealt with a gastrointestinal perforation that caused his colon to burst at age 49. Matthew almost died at the time and ended up being in the hospital for five months with two of those weeks in a coma.
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