Best known for his character as Chandler Bing in ‘Friends’, actor Matthew Perry has opened up about the health crisis that almost claimed his life several years ago.
As we all know how the actor had been writing his upcoming memoir that has been completed. He has talked about many personal struggles of his life including Friends again.
In a recent interview, the Friends star who is now 53 years old revealed that when he was 49 he was hospitalized for five months and spent two weeks in a coma. He used a colostomy bag for nine months, he says.
“The doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live,” he said. “I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”
The actor had previously discussed his battles with substance abuse, but the severity of his health crisis at 49 had been kept under wraps. He also goes into detail about his addictions during the run of Friends.
Cast on the sitcom at age 24, Perry was increasingly turning to alcohol, he said. “I could handle it, kind of,” the actor said. “But by the time I was 34, I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble. But there were years that I was sober during that time. Season 9 was the year that I was sober the whole way through. And guess which season I got nominated for best actor? I was like, ‘That should tell me something.’”
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Perry said that at one point during his addiction to prescription painkillers, he was taking 55 Vicodin a day and his weight had dropped to 128 pounds. “I didn’t know how to stop,” he said. “If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail,’ I’d start packing. I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”
Perry says his Friends’ co-stars were understanding, and they were patient. It’s like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
