Matthew Perry (“Friends”) tells how Jennifer Aniston dealt with her addiction: “I know you’re drinking”

On November 1st, Matthew Perry’s autobiography, entitled “Friends, Lovers, and So Terrible Things” comes out. In her, Perry writes about the time he played the charismatic Chandler Bing in “Friends,” which catapulted him to fame and plunged him into a spiral of anxiety and self-destruction.. The book is an honest and, how could it be otherwise, humor-filled account of what life was like behind the scenes of one of the most watched sitcoms, as well as its parallel battle with drugs and alcohol.

Perry describes how he started drinking at the age of 14, but his alcohol addiction began to emerge when he was just 24 years oldbut that really became a problem ten years later. “Then there were years when I was sober”he says, noting that in season 9 he remained sober while filming. “Guess what season I was nominated for Best Actor?”writes the actor. “I thought, ‘This should tell me something'”. However, his addiction later expanded to benzodiazepines and opioids, ingesting 55 Vicodin pills on some of his worst days. Perry, now 53, he came close to death at age 49 when his colon exploded from drug abuse. “The doctors told my family that I had a 2% chance of living”he tells PEOPLE magazine.

Jennifer Aniston, who played Rachel in the iconic series, was the first to confront him about his alcoholism, despite the actor never being drunk on set. For Perry, it was Aniston who confronted him was “devastating”because he was in love with hereven though he forgot it once he started dating Brad Pitt. “I know you’re drinking”he told him, which, according to the actor, left him confused, because he thought he was hiding it well. “We can smell it”Aniston said, in a plural that included the rest of the cast and hit him like a sledgehammer..

At the 2021 “Friends” meeting, Perry spoke for the first time about the pressure he endured every day: “I felt I would die (on set) if (the audience) didn’t laugh”adding it “sometimes I would break out a sentence and they wouldn’t laugh and I would start sweating and having convulsions if I didn’t have the laugh I should have”. Lisa Kudrow, the unclassifiable Phoebe of the series, responded, surprised: “You never told us”. Perry was in close contact with the show’s writers during filming, who almost always accepted his dialogue input., both for its character and for the rest; a role that, it seems in hindsight, he took too seriously.

Perry admits in a preview of an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC, which will premiere on Friday, October 28, that that interaction scared her, but that Aniston did not stop being by his side in that difficult time. She the actress spoke in an interview with Today, where she admitted it “I didn’t understand the level of anxiety and self-torture with which Mathew Perry carried”but looking back “made a lot of sense”. Perry states in the interview clip that Aniston “She was the one who kept in touch the most” and what is he “very grateful for that”.

The rest of ‘Amici’, also by his side

In addition to Aniston, Perry said his co-stars Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer were also understanding and patient with him, taking care of him. “It’s like with penguins. Penguins, in the wild, when you are sick, or when you are badly injured, the other penguins surround you and support you.”Perry told PEOPLE magazine. “They walk around until the penguin can walk alone. That’s what the cast did for me.”concludes.

Kudrow is behind the preface to Matthew Perry’s memoirwhere he writes it “it’s a horrible disease” Y “I love Matthew so much. We are part of a family. I basically end up with ‘I’ll be there for you’ (the title song from Friends), but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”.