The “bombshell revelations” from Matthew Perry’s memoir – the first by a Friends cast member – have been trickling out for weeks: Perry was sober for only one of Friends’s 10 seasons. He had a years-long crush on Jennifer Aniston and unceremoniously dumped Julia Roberts, whom he had wooed by fax machine in 1994. Since his mid-twenties, Perry has spent “upward of $7m” trying to overcome an addiction to alcohol and pills, entered rehab 65 times, and “nearly died” more than once.
Even before the worldwide release of Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing this week, Perry was compelled to issue a retraction over a sentence that hadn’t yet been published. Writing on the tragic drug-related deaths of his co-stars River Phoenix and Chris Farley, Perry laments – more than once – that somehow “Keanu Reeves still walks among us”. (Now, Perry says he wishes he’d used his own name instead of that of the internet’s boyfriend.)
