Matthew Perry Recalled Being "Painfully Hung Over" On 'Friends' Set Amid Drug Addiction Battle

Everyone's beloved Chandler Bing aka Matthew Perry from Friends recalled his longstanding fight against substance abuse and how it affected his performance on set. The late actor, who was found unresponsive in the pool of his LA home, was struggling with drug addiction for years before he breathed his last on October 28, 2023, due to "acute effects of ketamine." 

Apparently, the now-deceased actor was battling many addictions like alcohol, Vicodin, methadone, and amphetamines all the while working on the 90s hit sitcom. He told PEOPLE in 2013 that he was "very lonely" when he began working on the show and as a result, he would often come on set "painfully, painfully hung over" during his 10-year stint with Friends, per Daily Mail. 

He admitted that while he was "never high" at work, he tried his best to hide his problems from his co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, and Matt LeBlanc. But, to no avail, as he said, "Then eventually things got so bad I couldn't hide it, and then everybody knew. I've had a life of extreme highs and extreme lows. I was in the white-hot flame of fame. From an outsider's perspective, it would seem like I had it all. It was actually a very lonely time for me because I was suffering from alcoholism." 

His memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, shed more light on his dependency on alcohol from when he was barely 14 years old. "By the time I was 18, I was drinking every day," he wrote in his book as per Entertainment Weekly. But he wanted to make it big in Hollywood as he made a "dumb prayer," "God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please, make me famous." And he left an unforgettable legacy behind.

But his struggle with addiction was a long one. While he was on the career high with the best show of the time and the number one film The Whole Nine Yards, he was getting deeper and deeper into the fatal habit, "At the time, I should have been the toast of the town [but] I was in a dark room meeting with nothing but drug dealers and completely alone for months." 

"The weirdest thing I did was on Sundays I would go to open houses and go to the bathrooms...in the open house and see what pills they had in there and steal them," Perry explained the intensity of his addiction. "And I think they thought, 'Well, there's no way that Chandler came in and stole from us.'" 

The same year, in 2013, Perry converted his Malibu, California mansion into a sober living house which ran for two years, per NBC News. His own struggle with substance abuse prompted him to help those suffering from the same and his relentless efforts were recognized as he received the Champion of Recovery award from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Barack Obama.