When Friends actor Matthew Perry spoke about his struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction

In his tell-all memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry opened up about his drug and alcohol addiction. Coping with the separation of his parents and craving for their attention, he started drinking at the age of 14. The actor had confessed that by the time he was 18, he was “drinking every day”. He shared that his alcohol addiction was just starting to surface when he was first cast on the show 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,” People magazine quoted him.

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The actor also shared that there were years when he was sober during that time, revealing that he was sober during the shoot of season 9. “And guess which season I got nominated for best actor? I was like, ‘That should tell me something,” he said.

The cast of Friends. (Photo: Reuters)

Opening up about his drug addiction, Matthew Petty said that he was ‘taking 55 Vicodin a day’ leading him to put on weight. He said, “I didn’t know how to stop. If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail,’ I’d start packing. I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”

His struggles with alcohol continued even during the filming of Friends, with Perry confessing in interviews that he was frequently intoxicated on set. It was his castmates — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer — who eventually intervened and expressed their concerns about his well-being. Aniston, in particular, played a significant role in offering support, making the effort to check in on him regularly.

In a People magazine interview, Matthew Perry admitted that he had been to rehab 15 times over the years. The Emmy-nominated actor also shared how his co-stars were “understanding and patient”. Referring to penguins, he said, “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.”