“Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” released last week, is written with frequent, unfiltered candor after decades of trying to keep its issues a secret. “I’m an old drug addict with my back to the wall,” says Perry, 53, perched in a Tribeca hotel room, three days after the memoir was officially released. “I have anxiety with a secondary order of depression.”
In therapy since the age of 18, Perry gives names and reveals price tags. He shares stories of impotence, exploding colostomy bags, dumping Julia Roberts, romance with Valerie Bertinelli (with her passed out husband Eddie Van Halen nearby), crushing with no return on Jennifer Aniston and a an insatiable quest for fame that rivaled his appetite for pills and booze.
“I crave endless attention, but it’s never the right kind of attention,” he says. ” It did not work. It didn’t fix that hole in me, and it surprised me.
Perry looks tired, almost exhausted at 10 a.m. The actor is in the midst of an intense and whirlwind media tour during which he is asked to relay these horrors almost every hour. How he almost died. The story of being too unable to appear in a movie with three scenes opposite Meryl Streep.
The initial impression of his memoir is 1 million, second only to John Grisham this season, according to Publisher’s Weekly. He returned to his 1990s status as a bold actor in gossip columns.
Still, given his near-death odyssey, it’s fair to worry what it’s like Perry to constantly tell his torturous story. He writes that the longest duration of his sobriety is two years, with several relapses. How long has it been this time? “I keep it a bit quiet,” he says. “Long enough that I felt it was very safe to write this book.”
Perry’s candor continues to make news. “It puts me on the map, and people are talking about me again. It’s good because it’s been five or six years since there was any of that,” he says. “Sometimes I think I’ve gone through addiction, alcoholism, and fame to do what I’m doing right now, which is helping people.”
He remains amazed at “the size of this book and how much my face has come back into the public eye,” he says. “Right now, I’m everywhere. The paparazzi are back. Offers are coming. TV shows, movies. He was offered a TV drama the night before, he says, “but it wasn’t good enough.”
In “Friends, Lovers,” Perry writes that he spent $7 million on rehab at many five-star resorts around the world. Now he admits it was probably $9 million.
During “Friends” Season 3, circa 1996-1997, Perry shares that he ingested 55 Vicodin a day and dropped to 128 pounds. At his heaviest, drinking a liter of vodka a day, he weighed 100 pounds more. Perry abused drugs and alcohol in every year of the “Friends” decade except Season 9, which, he notes, was “the only one where I was nominated for an Emmy.” He received three more dramatic nods for performances on “The West Wing” and “The Ron Clark Story.”
Perry was often so hungover on set that if his character – Chandler Bing, sarcastic, tightly coiled and dressed in a sweater – needed to move from the sofa to the table, “I had to make sure my hand was leaning on something so I was not shaking,” he said.
“It didn’t escape me that Chandler had grown much faster than me,” he wrote.
He never used pills and alcohol on set, he says. But off-set? Permanently. “There was a time when it was really obvious,” says “Friends” co-creator and executive producer David Crane in a phone interview. “Like any family, you don’t see it until you’re supposed to. Success makes everyone even better. Whatever you have to do, it exacerbates whatever your deal is.
Crane has downloaded the memoirs but has yet to read them: “I approach it with some trepidation, knowing how much pain there is.”
Perry was a member of an exclusive six-person club raking in $1,100,040 per episode – but he felt completely left out from his fellow stars while drowning in addiction. Aniston went to her dressing room to express the cast’s concern. They were there for him. Perry says he remembers thinking, “It’s great that she’s doing this but I’m going to drink in 15 minutes.”
The book is sometimes difficult to read, especially for people with friends and relatives struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction.
“I think it was really, really honest and brutal and so brave. And, for me, part of what was so brave was letting you know what he was thinking all the time,” says Lisa Kudrow, co- ‘Friends’ star, who wrote the foreword to the memoir, on a call from New Zealand: “He’s really smart. We all know he’s really, really funny, but he can be really compassionate, rational and balanced.
The book was made without the help of a ghostwriter. Perry typed the proposal into his phone’s notes app, while riding in the back of a car. “It was pretty easy to write it down, to vomit on the page the ups and downs of my life,” he says.
“He had a desire to tell this story himself rather than be the subject of speculation,” says Megan Lynch, editor of Flatiron Books. “I never needed to touch the voice. It was so resonant, loud and clear.
As dissertation details emerged, Perry ended up having to publicly apologize to actor Keanu Reeves, whom he dismisses twice in the book, writing that Reeves “still walks among us” yet River Phoenix and Chris Farley died young of drug overdoses.
“A mistake. I realized it was not a good thing to do,” said Perry, who repeatedly apologized. “I should have used my name. I just didn’t think so. Additionally, a The story he tells in the book about the beating of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in elementary school may have been poorly remembered. “Now I don’t think I did,” he said. And Bertinelli took to TikTok, “mortified” that Perry recounted a makeup session that took place in his twenties.
The book touring, especially theatrical events in New York, Princeton, and Washington, proved therapeutic. “I’m more comfortable talking to 1,500 people than sitting on my couch watching TV,” he says. He hates being alone, even though he has improved in this area. Currently not in a relationship, Perry says that with one exception, he has ended all romantic relationships he had – mainly with actresses. “I was so driven by fear. I would end these relationships, and there are five or six women out there I’d like to be married to. His ‘helper/best friend,’ he wrote in the book. , lives with him. Why is he afraid of being alone? “I think I’m a little afraid of my mind,” he says.
Perry is not a fan of the second A of Alcoholics Anonymous. He did not get housing. “It plays into the stigma. It’s a disease. Why should we hide this? In Bill W.’s “The Big Book” of AA, “the point of his story is that these bad things happened to him and he kept drinking after that,” Perry says, a cup of coffee and a bottle of water next to it. . “My story sounds like a Cinderella story. My story is way worse than Bill’s.
Here’s what he wants to say to people struggling with addiction: “If hard work and determination were all it took to get sober, I would have gotten sober 20 years ago. It’s not about about it. It’s about a spiritual connection. It’s about opening your mind and your heart so you can have a spiritual experience,” he says. “I’ve scared people, a lot of people. There’s about five people who said ‘I’m done.’ I can’t watch this anymore. I’m done.’ I think I scared them enough that they were gone forever.
“The one thing that made me limit my drinking and drinking was that I had the best job in the world. I can’t blow this. I can’t lose this job,” he said. Miraculously, he didn’t. “When you make a million dollars a week, you can’t drink the 17th drink. If I didn’t have that, the show, I’d probably be in the street.
In “Friends, Lovers”, Perry shares his obsession with Batman. He’s moved around often but keeps a bathroom — a “bathroom” as he calls it — filled with superhero memorabilia. He jokingly calls an assistant “Alfred” who, in turn, calls Perry “Mr. Wayne. The actor bought a massive $20 million apartment that never felt like home because he thought it looked like a place where Bruce Wayne would live.
“We are both loners. We are both rich. We both drive black, cool cars,” says Perry, owner of an Aston Martin Vantage V8 Roadster. “I don’t fight crime, but I do save lives on occasion.”
He doesn’t watch “Friends,” although he did during his recent interview with Diane Sawyer, which brought him to tears, “watching this very thin, lost, scared man,” he says. “It’s a hard thing for me to watch, because I think, ‘Oh, I was on Vicodin at that time. Oh, I was drinking at that time. But I should watch it because I think that it would cheer me up to see it, because it’s good and it’s funny.
Acting offers are coming back now, years after “I fell off the map” and no one was talking about Matthew Perry in a good way. There is even talk of a filmed version of the memoirs. Perry would play himself in later years.
“Show business is an amazing thing. You can be nothing and then get a big job and be huge again,” he says. The book, he hopes, is the way back. “I’m open to anything,” he says.
And then, like that, Perry got out of his chair with barely a goodbye, and left, much like Batman.
