Matthew Perry Says He Spent An Unbelievable Amount Of Money Trying To Get Sober
Matthew Perry revealed that he spent over $9 million in his efforts to kick his alcohol and drug addiction.
Most people are aware of actor Metthew Perry’s struggles with addiction during and after his years on the iconic NBC sitcom Friends. In a new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry not only revealed the physical toll getting sober entailed, he detailed the economic cost as well. According to Movieweb, the now 53-year-old says he “probably spent $9 million” in his efforts to kick the habit.
In a New York Times interview to promote the book, Matthew Perry discussed just how much of his fortune went to ending his abuse of alcohol and drugs like Oxycontin. Perry rose to fame playing Chandler Bing in 235 episodes of Friends, which ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. Over the last few seasons of the series, Perry was making as much as $1 million an episode, but his addiction consumed a lot of that money and derailed his career.
During the height of Friends’ popularity in the 1990s, Perry crossed over into film, appearing in such hit comedies as Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek, The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis (and its sequel), and Serving Sara with Elizabeth Hurley.
On the set of Friends, however, he suffered from crippling anxiety over not being funny enough, an admission he only recently made during last year’s Friends reunion and caught many of his castmates, including Jennifer Aniston, by surprise. That helped fuel his abuse of alcohol and opiates, and when his addiction got out of control, it nearly cost him his life.
Matthew Perry claims at one point, he dropped his weight to 128 pounds, as he was taking 55 Vicodin tablets a day. That led to his colon rupturing and bursting, and being hospitalized with only a 2% chance of living.
He was hooked up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which forces the heart to beat and lungs to take in air, in a last-ditch effort to save his life. He said of the five people in his hospital that were hooked up to an ECMO machine on the same day he was, four of them died. He was hospitalized for five months, and his survival gave him a different outlook on life.
Perry says he has now been sober for 18 months, and his near-death experience helps keep him sober. “If you don’t have sobriety, you’re going to lose everything that you put in front of it,” he said. “So my sobriety is right up there. I’m an extremely grateful guy. I’m grateful to be alive, that’s for sure.”
Perry co-starred on Friends with Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer. The series won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2002 for Best Comedy Series, the same year Matthew Perry was nominated for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, which he didn’t win. He would earn three more Emmy nominations for his work on The West Wing and the TV movie The Ron Clark Story, and he and the rest of the cast were nominated for the Friends reunion special last year, for Best Variety Special.
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing releases on November 1.
