Matthew Perry says he got a little help from his “Friends.”
The actor’s commitment to his role as Chandler Bing on the long-running NBC sitcom helped him during his battle with substance abuse, he said Wednesday on “The View.”
“I wanted fame more than anybody in the world,” Perry said. “Steam would come out of my ears, I wanted fame so badly, and then I got it, and about six months later I went, ‘Oh, this is not fixing what I thought it would fix.’
“I’m very grateful for everything that happened, of course,” he continued. “It did help me with drugs and alcohol, that job, because when I said to myself, ‘I’m on this amazing show, you can’t have the 17th drink when you have to be at work the next morning with these wonderful people and doing the job.’
“I had a deal with myself that I would never drink or take anything while working, and I held up to that deal, but I was insanely hungover doing the work,” Perry added.
Wednesday marked Perry’s latest revelation about his issues with substance abuse, which he chronicles in his recently released memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.”
Perry, 53, recently told People he’s “grateful to be alive” after suffering a burst colon as a result of opioid use, saying he was given a 2% chance to survive.
“I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs,” Perry said. “And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”
His heart stopped for 5 minutes after he was given the anesthetic propofol for surgery following a night of using hydrocodone, Perry writes in the book.
He starred on all 10 seasons of “Friends,” which aired from 1994–2004.
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