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Matthew Perry may have been the king of sarcasm as Chandler Bing, but he was barely holding it together behind the scenes. Perry laid it all out during the Friends reunion on HBO Max: the guy was terrified every time he filmed in front of a live audience. “I felt like I was going to die every single night,” he admitted. The pressure to land every joke just right? It was brutal. Perry confessed that if a line didn’t get laughs, “I would sweat and just, like, go into convulsions.” His co-stars were stunned—Lisa Kudrow said, “You didn’t tell us that.”
Perry’s battles didn’t stop with anxiety, though. In 2016, he shared that three entire seasons of Friends were a blur thanks to his struggles with alcohol and pills. When asked which episode he liked the least, he had a pretty straightforward answer: “I don’t remember three years of it… somewhere between season 3 and 6.” He called himself a “just-add-water addict,” tracing it all back to his first drink at 14 and, later, his first opioids after a jet-ski accident. Those pills made him feel too good. His first thought? If this doesn’t kill me, I’m doing it again.
Perry avoided rewatching Friends for years because his body told the whole story. “When I was skinny, it was pills. When I was thicker, it was booze.” He only managed a fully sober season once—season nine—and surprise, that’s the one that snagged him an Emmy nomination.
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Even while Friends made him millions, Perry’s struggles were no secret to those close to him. Jennifer Aniston eventually had to step in, telling him the cast could smell alcohol on him and that they were worried. Things got so bad he’d even hit up open houses on weekends to snag pills from medicine cabinets, figuring, “Who’s going to accuse Chandler Bing?”
It took a toll. Perry nearly died more times than he could count. He’s been to rehab 15 times, detoxed 65 times, and had 14 surgeries. In his memoir, he drops the bomb: during one of his worst moments, his colon ruptured, leaving him in a coma for two weeks with a 2% survival chance. Hooked up to an ECMO machine, Perry was the only one of five patients that night who pulled through.
Matthew Perry’s journey is no joke. Behind the Chandler laughs and million-dollar paychecks was a guy trying to survive. His story isn’t just a look into his life—it’s a reminder of the battles many face out of the spotlight.
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