Matthew Perry made half the world laugh for ten years as Chandler Bing. Few people knew what it cost him to make it to each recording set.
In November 2022, one year before his death, he published his memoir “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing”. There he recounted that he spent seven million dollars trying to overcome his addictions, went to rehab at least fifteen times, and spent thirty years in therapy twice a week. In 2019, he had been in a coma after his colon ruptured.
“It isn’t fair that I had to go through this disease while the other five didn’t”, he said about his Friends co-stars. “They got everything I got, but I had to fight this”.
Days later, on Real Time with Bill Maher, he clarified something important: he never sought to end his life through drugs, although he knew perfectly well the risk he ran every time he touched them. Marta Kauffman and David Crane, creators of the series, spoke with him two weeks before his death. They remember him as happy, in a good place. On October 28, 2023, Perry drowned at his home in California. He was 54 years old. He didn’t win that fight. But he dared to tell it out loud, so that others wouldn’t have to fight it alone.
