Matthew Perry Couldn't Watch Himself on 'Friends' for One Painful Reason

On October 28, Canadian-American actor Matthew Perry died at the age of 54 in a reported drowning at his Los Angeles home.

Since the news broke, fans and former castmates have been sharing tributes to the star, who was best known for playing Chandler Bing in the sitcom Friends from 1994 to 2004.

The long-running sitcom made Perry a household name, but the show was also a public record of his addiction struggles. In his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry said that he couldn't watch the series due to his changing appearance.

"I was on Friends, getting watched by 30 million people, and that's why I can't watch the show," Perry said. "I was, like, brutally thin and being beaten down so badly by the disease."

Perry wrote in his memoir that he began drinking at age 14. After a jet-ski accident in 1996 while filming the movie Fools Rush In, the actor became addicted to the painkiller Vicodin. In 1997, Perry went into rehab for the first time, and in 2000, was admitted to hospital due to pancreatitis caused by alcohol abuse. "Unfortunately, that still wasn't enough to get me to quit drinking," he told People magazine in 2002.

Perry had a close relationship with the Friends cast—including David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc—with his co-stars staging an intervention during the later seasons.

At the time, Perry was regularly showing up on-set drunk, on drugs or hungover, telling People magazine in 2016 that he couldn't remember three years of filming due to addiction. At one point, the actor said he was taking 55 Vicodin pills a day and weighed just 128 pounds.

In 2018, Perry was given a 2 percent chance of survival after his colon ruptured due to abuse of the opioid Oxycontin. He recovered, but was in a coma for two weeks and needed to use a colostomy bag for nine months.

Perry visited 65 rehab facilities during his lifetime and estimated that he spent $9 million to get sober. Toward the end of his life, the star dedicated himself to supporting other people struggling with addiction.

In 2021, the Friends cast came together for an HBO reunion special, where they discussed their memories of filming the show. Although Perry was proud of his work on the sitcom, he also said in his memoir that he didn't want Friends to be his only legacy.

"The best thing about me, bar none, is if somebody comes up to me and says, 'I can't stop drinking. Can you help me?' I can say yes and follow up and do it," Perry wrote in the memoir.

"And I've said this for a long time: when I die, I don't want Friends to be the first thing that's mentioned—I want that to be the first thing that's mentioned. And I'm going to live the rest of my life proving that."