NIGEL PARRY / THELICENSINGPROJECT.COM

Road to recovery

No one told Matthew Perry life was going to be this way

by CHRISTINA GUERRERO

Canadian American actor Matthew Perry was seemingly on top of the world in 2000. He was a lead cast member on the hit sitcom Friends, and he co-starred with Bruce Willis in the crime comedy film The Whole Nine Yards. But Perry never celebrated that success, because he was too busy calling drug dealers.

“I think this book will help people, because my life looked like I had it all, but I was fighting this disease,” Perry says about his new memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

The memoir describes how Perry grew up with divorced parents living in two different countries, followed his dad’s footsteps into acting, entered relationships he later ended prematurely and starred in Friends, where he played the humorous and lovable character Chandler Bing. After that successful role, he tried to distance himself from the character for 10 years by only accepting parts that were its opposite. He later realized that if he is going to be remembered for making a mark, it’s not bad to have it be for a really fun TV show, and admits that it is kind of impossible to get away from.

“I do have a sense of humor. It is similar to that character [Chandler]. It flows through this book; even though I’m talking about very hard things, my sense of humor comes through in it too,” he tells the Connection on the phone from Los Angeles. “So hopefully people … are laughing and crying and experiencing a lot of emotions while reading it. Because, again, there isn’t anything that’s not in there. It’s all in there.

Telling his story

Perry says the book also covers events in his life he would rather not talk about, including his lifelong struggle with addiction. “I got tired of people kind of guessing what was going on with me, and I got tired of the rags writing things about me. So I thought I would tell the story myself so that it would be real … and the major motivating factor to writing this book was to help people,” he says.

Perry’s drug abuse came to a head in 2018. After he suffered a perforated colon, leaving him in a coma for three weeks, in the hospital for five months and learning to walk again, Perry wanted to share his story to shed light on drug and alcohol abuse and recovery, and to help others suffering from addictions. He includes intimate details of the extent of his addiction to prescription drugs, alcohol and cigarettes.

“It … was a rather cleansing experience writing it,” he says. “But then I had to [record] it for the audiobook, so I had to kind of go back into it and read it. And that was almost impossible for me to do. Because I was writing about this tortured life filled with big highs and big lows. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, how did the person get through this?’ And I sort of realized, wait a minute, this is me that I’m writing about. And it just was very difficult, and I cried.

Asking for help

Perry, 18 months sober at the time of this interview, says the main message throughout the book is that sobriety isn’t easy. He reveals that he spent nearly $7 million trying to get sober, attended approximately 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings and 15 rehabilitation centers, and detoxed 65 times. He has spoken at AA events and sponsored other addicts. In May 2013, he received a Champion of Recovery award from the Obama administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy for his work meeting with lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to push the efficacy of drug courts, which decriminalize nonviolent addicts, offering them treatment instead of jail time.

“It touches everybody’s life in some way. I mean, everybody knows somebody who is going through this problem. And it will attack anybody,” he says.

The best advice Perry could give anyone battling an addiction is to be honest about it and talk to someone. “That’s probably the first thing. And try not to keep it a secret,” he says. “If you’re going through something that you don’t understand, raise your hand and talk to people who do understand it, and reach out for help. The problem is that if we keep a secret going, we get sicker and sicker and sicker and use more and more and more until it gets very, very dangerous.”

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A love for acting

Matthew Perry began performing in high school plays.

“I thought I was pretty good at it when I was a kid, and I got my first TV show when I was 18,” Perry says; the show was Second Chance, which was later changed to Boys Will Be Boys. “And it was just something that was so fun and pretty easy to do. And I just couldn’t believe that you got paid a lot of money to do it. So yeah, it was that or being an ice dancer.”

Perry has been cast with his dad, actor John Bennett Perry; they have even appeared as father and son.—CG

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