Friday 28 October 2022 10:40 PM A $9million sobriety fight: The toll of Friends star Matthew Perry's battle ... trends now

As his loved ones raced to the Los Angeles hospital where they were told he had only a 2 per cent chance of surviving the night, doctors were preparing to connect Friends star Matthew Perry to a machine nicknamed the 'Hail Mary'.

Used to mechanically oxygenate the blood so that the heart and lungs can rest and heal, it is considered a last resort. Perry, then 49, was in need of desperate measures thanks to his years of drug abuse, heavy drinking and dependence on powerful painkillers.

On that touch-and-go night in 2018, his addiction to opioids had left him with pneumonia and a burst colon. Shortly after being admitted to hospital he slipped into a coma, which would last two weeks. When he came round he discovered he had been fitted with the colostomy bag he had to wear for the next nine months.

Yet even this was not enough to keep him sober. Two years later his heart stopped beating for five minutes after doctors at a luxury rehab facility in Switzerland administered a sedative which interacted with the opioids in his ravaged body. They managed to resuscitate him but broke eight ribs in the process, forcing him to pull out of a role alongside Meryl Streep in the film Don't Look Up.

Perry describes that lost opportunity as 'heartbreaking', but the consequences of his addictions have gone way beyond a single missed movie role.

Those two near-death experiences are just part of the catalogue of horror which is his new autobiography Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing — an astonishingly frank account in which he reveals for the first time the years of addiction he hid while portraying the wise-cracking, hopelessly romantic Chandler Bing in Friends.

That role eventually earned him around $1 million per episode, making him one of the best-paid actors in the world.

But for Perry, fame came at an extremely high price, not least the $9 million he reckons he has spent on trying to remain sober.

Estimating that he has made some 6,000 visits to Alcoholics Anonymous, he has also been in rehab 15 times and undergone 12 operations to save his life.

At one point, his gums were so diseased from his debauched lifestyle that his top front teeth fell out as he bit into toast spread with peanut butter, and he found himself carrying them to the dentist in a plastic bag.

He insists he never turned up to the Friends set while high or drunk, but admits that you can tell what he was using from his physical on-screen appearance.

While making the show, which ran between 1994 and 2004, Perry's weight varied from 9st 2lb to 16st 1lb. If he was skinny, it was painkillers. If he was carrying weight, it was drink, and there were many times when he turned up for filming hungover.

Once, during a scene in the iconic Central Perk coffee shop, he passed out on the famous orange couch and co-star Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey, had to nudge him awake to say his line.

On another occasion, Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and called him out for his drinking, telling him 'in a weird but loving way' that 'we can smell it'.

To be confronted by her must have been particularly devastating because, as he admits, he was 'crushing badly' on her from the moment filming began, his ardour cooled only by 'her deafening lack of interest'.

He had more success with Julia Roberts, who in 1996 appeared briefly in the sitcom — by then a global ratings hit — as Susie Moss, Chandler's girlfriend. Roberts agreed to Perry's request for a cameo only if he'd write her a paper on quantum physics, which he duly faxed to her the next day.

Their off-screen romance was brief, though, lasting only two months before Perry ended it.

'I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me . . . so instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.

'She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can't begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.'

Behind this decision, and indeed many of his problems with addiction, lay Perry's conviction that he is 'broken, bent, unlovable'.

He traces these feelings in part to his childhood. Born in 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he was the son of actor and model John Perry and journalist Suzanne Morrison, a former press secretary to the then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

His father left the family when Perry was a baby, leaving him with a lifelong fear of abandonment. 'If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am, you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me,' he writes.

His drinking began with beer and cheap wine when he was only 14 years old, and by his 21st birthday party it was already showing signs of being out of control. That night, he knocked back seven whisky cocktails and a bottle of wine before getting into the back of a stranger's car after mistaking it for a cab.

Moving to Los Angeles to pursue his childhood dream of stardom, he appeared in several television shows before successfully auditioning for Friends.

The six-strong regular cast hit it off from the start, and their enduring friendship off camera was undoubtedly a big feature in the chemistry on set, but Perry still found filming hugely stressful.

'I felt like I was gonna die if the live audience didn't laugh,' he admitted on the reunion show in 2021. 'And I would sweat and just, like, go into convulsions. I felt like that every night.'

The enormous success of the show and the subsequent paparazzi attention for the six previously relatively unknown actors meant 'every single moment of our lives being documented in public for all to see for ever'.

This did not help with Perry's

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