Matthew Perry Reveals Heartbreaking Reason He Couldn't See Himself on Screen in "Friends"

[It was Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing on the long-running sitcom "Friends," which aired from 1994 to 2004 and enjoyed high ratings. [Perry revealed in a November 2022 interview that he couldn't bear to tune in because he "could tell season after season" about his addiction to drugs and alcohol, which plagued him for nearly 25 years until he got completely sober in May 2021.

"I drink... Opium... Drinking ... I didn't watch the show because I could go on cocaine and I didn't watch the show," he said in an interview with "Q with Tom Power" (according to People). 'Every season, I can tell by the way I look. I don't think other people can tell, but I can. That's why I don't want to look at it, because that's what I see, and that's what I realized when I saw it."

Perry, who became a star in her mid-20s with Friends, said of her early fame, "I could handle it. But by the time I turned 34, I was really in a lot of trouble. " he says of himself in the mid-1990s. I was just always 'on'; it wasn't until I was in my mid-30s that I realized I didn't have to do that. I was 24 when I landed this role, and my illness had just begun at that time." At one point in his opioid addiction, Perry was taking 55 Vicodin pills a day, and his weight plummeted to 128 pounds. I didn't know how to stop," he said. 'This disease and addiction is progressive, so as you get older it just gets worse and worse.'

Perry's "Friends" co-stars rallied around him during filming as he struggled with his addiction, he said: "They were understanding and patient. They were understanding and patient," he said. Perry, who famously made $1 million a week on the show, said he would trade that fame and fortune "to not have this disease."

For the show's viewers, Perry wrote in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, "You can track my addiction by weighing me season by season. When you're fat, it's alcohol; when you're thin, it's drugs. When I'm bearded, it's lots of pills. By the end of Season 3, he was spending most of his time trying to figure out how to get 55 Vicodin pills a day.

Perry says in his book that he detoxed 65 times, but his first detox was when he was 26 and in the middle of filming "Friends." If you watch Season 3 of "Friends," he writes, "I hope you are horrified at how skinny I was at the end of the season (opioids made me lose my appetite and even vomit more). In the season 3 finale, the clothes he wore looked "at least three sizes too big on me."

Perry asked viewers of the show to "compare how I look between the last episode of Season 6 and the first episode of Season 7 (Chandler and Monica's proposal). I'm wearing the same clothes in the last episode of season 6 and the first episode of season 7 (supposedly the same night), and I must have lost 50 pounds in the off-season. During my time on Friends, my weight fluctuated between 128 and 225 pounds. "

Because of these things, Perry, in an interview with Tom Power, said that he was thinking about watching the show because of the "incredible" experience he had filming with castmates Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, and others Said he would start watching it: "But first of all, I think I would start watching it because it was such an incredible journey. But to see it touch so many different generations was just amazing." It's been important and meaningful, and I'd love to see it again. It was really interesting, and everyone was really nice. And I was too worried about this."

One can only hope that Perry had the opportunity to do so before his tragic death yesterday at his Los Angeles home from an apparent drowning. He was only 54.

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