Matthew Perry and alcoholism: "There are parts of Friends that I don't remember because I recorded them drunk"

2023-10-29 02:07:29

It’s hard to talk about Matthew Perry without a smile, remembering your Chandler Bingthe character that would make him a global celebrity in Friendsthe legendary sitcom that marked TV from 1994 to 2004. Fame did not come alone, It also brought a lot of moneyand Perry along with his five companions in that series In recent seasons, they earned one million dollars for each of the 24 episodes. that generally made up NBC’s annual offering. When they closed that cycle, in 2004, the offers to continue even for a year were directly heavenly, but the demanding filming routines had tired them, the relationships between the six members were sometimes tense, and so the curtain fell after 236 chaptersleaving a legacy that would identify each of those actors and actresses forever.

Of course, in addition to fame, At that time there was a side of addictions that Perry dealt with for a long time, almost always and helped by his colleagues, but also “protected” by the gigantic production and marketing apparatus that NBC had set up around the series by Marta Kauffman and David Crane, considered in many votes by specialists as “the best sitcom in history.”

Perry with David Schwimmer and Matt Leblanc, his Friends co-stars, at an awards ceremony in Pasadena in 2002.

Those ghosts of alcoholism haunted Perry from a young age, leading him to treatment not only for alcohol but also for an addiction to painkillers. But everything, according to those close to him, had come to a halt in recent years, and so his friends highlighted that he “had been sober for a long time.” Of course, given the shocking news of his death this Saturday in Los Angeles, in a jacuzzi, those shadows of addictions immediately led to conjecture whether such a sad ending could not be related to some of those problems that Matthew dealt with for so long.

So much LA Times like TMZ, which were the first media outlets to report the actor’s death, later noted that “There were no signs of a criminal act at the scene.”

They also recalled that he went through several rehabilitation clinics and a couple of years ago, when the cast of the series met and there was even speculation that some special episodes could be made, Perry surprised his colleagues by saying that “suffered severe anxiety attacks” during the recordings, and that there was “parts of the series that I watch and don’t remember, because I recorded them while completely drunk”. As detailed by TMZ, citing anonymous sources, there were no drugs in Perry’s house, and the investigation now aimed to see what happened, if she suffered a heart attack while she was in the jacuzzi.