'Friends' Creators Once Talked Matthew Perry Out of the Show During His Peak Addiction

Matthew Perry in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, revealed that he was sober only for the filming of season nine of the popular NBC series Friends, where he portrayed the character of Chandler Bing. Up until the 2004 series finale, Perry struggled with addiction and spent time in rehab. In October 2023, he was discovered dead following a ketamine overdose.

The creators of the show, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, have disclosed that they learned of his addiction much later. “By the time we became aware of it, we were already a family on many levels,” Crane told The Times U.K. They even remembered talking him out of the show. “There was a point where we asked him, ‘Do you want to stop [being in the show]?’ And he was adamantly like, ‘No, this is really important to me,’” Crane stated.

In an exclusive 2022 cover story with People, Perry admitted that his Friends castmates supported him during his dark phase. "I thought being funny all the time was how I would get through," he said. "I thought [Friends] was going to fix everything. It didn't...I didn't know how to stop," he admitted. "Because the disease and the addiction [was] progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older." He added, "They were understanding, and they were patient...It's like penguins. In nature, when one is sick or very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up and walk around until that penguin can walk on its own. And that's kind of what the cast did for me." 

The actor confessed that being part of the show helped him stay alive. "The fact that I would trade it all to not have this disease is true. But I don't belittle how fun the experience has been on Friends," he shared. "And the money was amazing. Just the creative experience of being on Friends probably saved my life." He continued, "When you're making a million dollars a week, you can't drink the 37th drink. You have to go home and go to sleep…That was the greatest job in the world." 

Describing the various phases of addiction while filming for the show, Perry wrote in his memoir, “If you gauge my weight from season to season— when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I am skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills,” he recalled as per Today. Due to his addiction, the Serving Sara actor had to undergo 14 operations and 15 rounds of rehab treatment. Perry discussed his performance-related stress during the 2021 Friends reunion. 

“To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn’t laugh,” he said. “If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out.” Perry also revealed that he had no recollection of what he did on the show during his peak addiction years. “I don’t remember three years of it,” he told in 2016 on BBC Radio 2’s The Chris Evans Breakfast Show. “A little bit of the time, I was a little out of it,” he confessed.