There has long been a pretty nasty narrative about Matthew Perry, namely around his weight. He has either - according to tabloid headlines - been too fat or thin for most of his career. Now, the Friends actor has revealed in a shocking new memoir - ‘Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing’ - that his weight was actually the big indicator behind his drink and drug abuse - which he says has cost him around $9 million during his lifetime.
‘You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,’ he writes. ‘When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.’ He also reveals that he was in a coma and came close to death during his decades long battle with Vicodin, Xanax and drink.
In that time, he says, it was - out of his Friends cast mates - Jennifer Aniston who confronted him about his increasingly obvious issues. ‘“I know you’re drinking,’ she said,” Perry, now 53, writes in the memoir. ‘I had long since gotten over her – ever since she started dating Brad Pitt, I was fine [earlier in the book he describes how Jennifer turned him down when they were younger] – and had worked out exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward, but still, to be confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating. And I was confused,’ he continued. “‘How can you tell?’ I said. I never worked drunk. ‘I’ve been trying to hide it …’”
In an interview with Diane Sawyer, Matthew adds that Jen’s support was crucial to his recovery. ‘She was the one that reached out the most,’ he said. ‘I'm really grateful to her for that.’ He explained that, while he should have been enjoying the height of his fame, his addiction nearly derailed everything: ‘At the time I should have been the toast of the town. I was in a dark room meeting nothing but drug dealers and completely alone.’
Now, Matthew, who played Chandler Bing, is sober and happy. ‘I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again,’ he told People of the book. ‘I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober – and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction – to write it all down. And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people.’