Just like their popular sitcom, Friends alum Matthew Perry says he is “grateful” to his co-stars, especially Jennifer Aniston, for “being there” for him while he was struggling with addiction.
According to entertainment outlet The Hollywood Reporter, in a preview clip for his upcoming interview with Diane Sawyer, Perry said Aniston was in close contact with him throughout the tough time, which dated back to his mid-20s and early years on the NBC show.
“Jennifer, she says, ‘We know you’re drinking’,” Sawyer told Perry in the clip.
Describing the moment as “scary”, he said, “She (Aniston) was the one that reached out the most. You know, I’m really grateful to her for that.” The two-minute clip also touched upon other parts from their interview, which will be out on October 28, that shows how at one point he was taking 55 Vicodin, methadone, Xanax and drinking a full quarter of vodka in one day.
“I should have been the toast of the town, but I was in a dark room meeting with nothing but drug dealers and completely alone,” Matthew Perry, who shot to international fame for his portrayal of the socially awkward Chandler Bing who used sarcasm to get by in life, told Sawyer.
Previously, the 53-year-old actor had opened up to People magazine ahead of the November 1 release of his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing about how he thought being funny all the time would help him “get through”.
“I thought (‘Friends’) was going to fix everything. It didn’t,” he had said.
While Jennifer Aniston had reached out to him the most, she wasn’t the only Friends star to support him. Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc were other four lead cast members on the long-running show.
“They were understanding, and they were patient. It’s like penguins. In nature, when one is sick or very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up and walk around until that penguin can walk on its own. And that’s kind of what the cast did for me,” he had recalled.
Matthew Perry had also said there was a point of time when he was close to death after experiencing a gastrointestinal perforation and his colon bursting following opioid misuse.
“The doctors told my family that I had a two per cent chance to live,” he had revealed to the magazine.
Matthew Perry was in the hospital for weeks after his colon-related emergency. He was in coma for two weeks and spent another five months in hospital care before he had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.