Matthew Perry’s forthcoming memoir continues to make headlines because the Friends alum opens up about his crippling habit to alcohol and opioids for the primary time. In Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry reveals his heart stopped beating for 5 minutes whereas at a therapy middle in Switzerland the place he was nonetheless feeding his capsule behavior. It price him a job in final 12 months’s star-studded political satire Don’t Look Up.
Perry, who is eighteen months sober, secretly went to the posh rehab facility someday in the final two years. According to an excerpt of his e book obtained by Rolling Stone, the actor satisfied medical doctors that he had extreme abdomen ache in order that they’d prescribe him medication.
“In fact, I was OK,” he writes.
Perry was prescribed hydrocodone, however to ease the ache additional, medical doctors determined to “put some kind of weird medical device in my back.” The evening earlier than the surgical procedure, he stayed up taking capsules. When he was administered the anesthesia drug propofol forward of the operation, Perry’s heart stopped.
“I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m.,” he pens. “I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating. I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest. If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?”
Perry provides: “He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight of my ribs.”
While the medical scare took a bodily toll on Perry, it impacted his profession, too. The actor was set to seem alongside Meryl Streep in Don’t Look Up. He managed to movie one scene previous to his Switzerland rehab stint, but it surely did not make the film’s closing lower. After practically dying on the working desk, he was in an excessive amount of ache to return to the set of Adam McKay’s movie. Perry says it will have been the “biggest movie I’d gotten ever.”
Switzerland wasn’t Perry’s solely brush with dying. In 2018, his colon burst from opioid misuse. At one level Perry was consuming vodka by the quart and taking 55 Vicodin a day. He additionally abused OxyContin and Xanax. The actor estimates he is spent $9 million getting sober — which he was lastly in a position to do forward of the Friends reunion in April 2021.
MORE: Matthew Perry shares habit story in new memoir: ‘I’m grateful to be alive’
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