‘Friends’ star Matthew Perry continues to share candid moments from his long journey to sobriety and the struggles he endured during his run on the long-running NBC sitcom even as he was yo-yoing between addictions to Vicodin and alcohol, reports CNN.
In an excerpt from his much-anticipated new book “'Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing', the American Canadian actor recounts how a visit from co-star Jennifer Aniston to his trailer made him realise his secret behaviour, when it came to alcohol, wasn’t so secret. “I know you’re drinking,” she said.
Perry, now 53, writes in the memoir, in an excerpt published by the ‘Times’ of London: “I had long since gotten over her -- ever since she started dating Brad Pitt, I was fine -- and had worked out exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward, but still, to be confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating. And I was confused.”
Continuing his account of the visit by Aniston, Perry recalls asking her: “How can you tell? ... I’ve been trying to hide it.”
Elsewhere in the excerpt, according to CNN, Perry mentioned how he “never” worked high or drunk (although he “certainly worked hungover”). He said he was largely able to function as part of the uber-successful ‘Friends’ ensemble, thanks to his castmates and how they would “group around (him) and prop (him) up” like an injured penguin being supported by the other penguins.
But that day in Perry’s trailer, Aniston told him plainly that he wasn’t getting away with anything.
“We can smell it,” she said, “in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural ‘we’ hit me like a sledgehammer,” Perry writes. “I know I’m drinking too much,” I said, recalls Perry, “but I don’t exactly know what to do about it.”
“By the end of season three, I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get 55 Vicodin a day -- I had to have 55 every day, otherwise I’d get so sick. It was a full-time job: making calls, seeing doctors, faking migraines, finding crooked nurses who would give me what I needed,” Perry writes.
“Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” by Matthew Perry will be published by Headline on November 1.
