Matthew Perry needed to be extra than simply Friends with considered one of his feminine costars on the NBC mega-hit.
In a primetime interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer that aired Friday to advertise his revealing new memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry admitted that he harbored a crush on costar Jennifer Aniston. (Years earlier than Friends, Perry really requested Aniston out, however she stated no.) “Well, how can you not have a crush on Jenny? And Courteney [Cox]? And Lisa [Kudrow]? So I made it kind of difficult to go to work, because I had to pretend that I didn’t have these crushes.” He even puzzled if he was observing Aniston an excessive amount of whereas capturing their scenes collectively: “Is three seconds too long?”
Perry additionally detailed the ravages {that a} lifetime of drug and alcohol habit have had on him, telling Sawyer he remembers ingesting a complete bottle of wine together with his mates at age 14: “I lay in the grass and just was in heaven. And I thought to myself, ‘This must be the way that normal people feel all the time.’” By age 18, he was ingesting daily, and he hoped his breakout Friends position as sarcastic jokester Chandler Bing would possibly function a treatment for his habit. But the pressures of being on an enormous hit solely drove him deeper into ingesting.
Perry advised Sawyer he didn’t indulge whereas on the Friends set: “I made a rule that I would never drink or take anything at work… but I would show up blindly hungover. Like, shaking and crazy hungover.” Aniston confronted him about his ingesting, telling him they might odor the alcohol on him. He turned to prescription painkillers after a jet-ski accident, finally taking as much as 55 Vicodin tablets a day. To get them, he defined, he used “a bunch of doctors, fake migraines, all that stuff,” even going to actual property open homes simply to undergo their drugs cupboards and steal their tablets.
While capturing 2002’s Serving Sara, Perry was to date gone on vodka, Xanax and methadone that they needed to shut down manufacturing and have him dub in his dialogue later as a result of he was slurring his phrases a lot. He was driving backwards and forwards to the Friends set from a rehab facility, together with when Chandler married Monica: “I was driven in a big blue pickup truck to marry Monica from a treatment center.” Looking again on outdated episodes of Friends now, Perry stated he can inform what substance he was abusing on the time primarily based on how he appears: “When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol. When I’m skinny, it’s pills.” He cringed whereas watching again one Friends scene with Sawyer the place he was significantly skinny: “I feel sorry for that guy. Because that’s a guy that’s out of control.”
Throughout his struggles, although, Aniston all the time checked in on him, Perry reveals: “She was the one that reached out the most… I’m really grateful for that.”
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