Matthew Perry, known for playing Chandler Bing on the hit NBC sitcom “Friends,” has died in Los Angeles. He was 54 years old.
In November 2022, he had published his memoir titled “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terribe Thing”. On the occasion of this outing, the star gave a long interview to the famous American journalist Diane Sawyer.
“She’s the one who reached out to me the most,” Matthew Perry said of his on-screen partner and friend Jennifer Aniston. The interpreter of Rachel would have in fact actively supported him while he fought against his addictions to alcohol and medication.
“I didn’t know how she knew. I had tried to hide my alcoholism. But she told me, ‘We can feel it.’ It was said in a strange but loving way. Mostly this plural, this ‘we’, hit me like a hammer. I replied: ‘I know I drink too much… but I don’t know exactly what to do to stop it,'” continued the actor, expressing in the stride his eternal “gratitude” towards Jen.
As for the other members of the Friends clan, they were also very supportive. “It’s like penguins,” explained Matthew Perry. “In the wild, when one is sick or very injured, the other penguins surround it and support it and walk until that penguin can walk on its own. And that’s kind of what the casting did for me .”
His old demons have sent him terrible signals many times. The actor suffered an intestinal perforation and was in a coma for two weeks. But he also spent five months in the hospital after his colon exploded due to very regular use of opiates. “The doctors said I had a 2% chance of survival,” even remembered the star who never had children. “I was put on a machine called ECMO, which does breathing instead of the heart and lungs. Five people were put on an ECMO machine that night, the other four died and I survived. The big question is therefore why. Why was I the only one?” he asked himself a few months ago.
Writing