The sitcom star’s fascinating, gruesome tale of addiction and how he kept the show on the road
When Matthew Perry was taking his first steps as an actor, his father bought him a book called Acting With Style. John Bennett Perry, a singer and performer best known for appearing in Old Spice adverts in the 1970s and 80s, wrote in the inside page: “Another generation shot to hell. Love, Dad.” Little did he know how accurate his inscription would turn out to be. Professionally, his son would easily outshine him, landing the part of Chandler Bing in Friends, the biggest sitcom in TV history. But, in life, it was Matthew who came off worse, a result of his catastrophic addictions to alcohol and opiates.
By turns fascinating and maddening, Perry’s memoir is less a tale of a glittering showbiz career than a fitfully gruesome account of his efforts to keep the show on the road. He reckons to have attended 6,000 AA meetings, detoxed 65 times, and spent in the region of $7m to get sober. His book begins, as so many addiction memoirs do, with him at his lowest ebb. Hospitalised after an “explosion” of the bowel, a result of chronic constipation caused by opiate abuse, he had arrived at the emergency room screaming in pain and then fallen into a coma which lasted for 14 days. “It’s kind of poetic,” he notes. “I was so full of shit it nearly killed me.”
The drily funny tone is typical of Perry, who read the early Friends scripts and saw a kindred spirit in the smart, withering Chandler. Realising in his teens he could use humour to get people’s attention, he turned being funny into an Olympic sport. With two school friends he developed a sarcastic way of talking – example: “Could the teacher be any meaner?” – which would later become his character’s signature.
His problems started well before he became a household name. A child of divorced parents, he had long felt like an outsider in his own family. From the age of five, he would travel alone by plane from Montreal to visit his father in Los Angeles wearing a sign that read “Unaccompanied minor”. At 14, he was delighted to discover that drinking quelled the negative thoughts and made him more charming too. Later on, a painkiller prescription brought fresh serenity and soon he was knocking back 55 pills a day