Matthew Perry is sharing both the highs of his career and the darkest lows of his life in his new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, due out next month. In the book, Perry reveals that a few years ago, at the age of 49, he almost died. While he publicly acknowledged that he was suffering from a gastrointestinal perforation, he was actually fighting for his life at the time after his colon burst from opioid overuse. The actor spent two weeks in a coma, five months in the hospital, and had to use a colostomy bag for the next nine months. He shared that when he was first admitted to the hospital, “the doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live. I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary.”
… Perry explained that his alcoholism began when he was cast on Friends at the age of 24. “I could handle it, kind of. But by the time I was 34, I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble. But there were years that I was sober during that time. Season 9 was the year that I was sober the whole way through. And guess which season I got nominated for best actor? I was like, ‘That should tell me something.'” But his addiction quickly escalated out of his control, like at one point when he was down to just 128 pounds and taking 55 Vicodin a day.
… While his cast mates “were understanding, and they were patient,” Perry’s condition became harder and harder to hide, especially as his addiction produced increasingly dramatic changes in his appearance. “It’s like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”