2023-10-29 19:37:00
Matthew Perry lived a roller coaster destiny: glory and hell, peaks and abyss, a life of ups and downs, between cures and relapses, under the permanent influence of alcohol and painkillers… “If I died, it wouldn’t surprise anyone,” he declared. in an interview with People last year, when he published an unfiltered autobiography, where he hid nothing about his chaotic life.
“When fame comes, it’s a bit like living in Disneyland for a while,” he admitted in hindsight. For me it lasted about eight months, with this feeling of I succeeded, I’m delighted, there is no problem in the world. And then you understand that it adds nothing, it fills absolutely no hole in your life,” he admitted. in the columns of New York Times.READ ALSO Death of Matthew Perry: why we loved Chandler Bing so much
He had his first drunk at 14, while downing a bottle of wine. It was the beginning of the excesses which led him to abandon tennis competitions, a sport in which he excelled but which required a Spartan lifestyle. He then turned towards comedy, landing small roles in films and series before playing Chandler Bing in Friends in 1994. Three years later, he became addicted to Vicodin (a painkiller) following a skiing accident. An addiction which is added to that of alcohol, Xanax and cocaine, a toxic mixture which will poison his life – he confides having spent the equivalent of 9 million dollars on more than fifty treatments and detoxification cures.
2% chance of survival
“I was taking 55 Vicodin a day,” he confided. to the Canadian media CBC. I didn’t watch the show and I still haven’t, because I could have said: drink, opiates, drink, cocaine… I could tell season by season, from the way I look. That’s why I don’t want to watch the show, because that’s what I see in myself. » In ten years, the actor went from 58 to more than 100 kg because of alcohol and in return took weight loss pills, a vicious spiral…
With formidable consequences on his body: acute pancreatitis in 2000, loss of his teeth, perforation of the colon in 2019 due to taking opiates… “The doctors told my family that I had a 2% chance of live,” he explained to People. He then spent five months in hospital, including two weeks in a coma, and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months. On his stomach, 14 scars remind him of his ordeal, “like a reminder to stay sober”.
A final warning which encourages him to take control of himself. Matthew Perry ends up getting back on track, he takes up sports, plays pickleball regularly, regularly attends Alcoholics Anonymous, and finishes writing his memoirs, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published last year by Headline Editions. He then said he was in good health, convinced that his long fight could help others.
And to thank his colleagues for Friends, who knew and always supported him in the ordeal, associating them with the solidarity that we find, according to him, among penguins. “In the wild, when one of them is sick or injured, they walk around him until he can walk on his own,” he recalled in People. That’s kind of what they did for me.”
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