While Matthew Perry portrayed the sarcastic yet incredibly loved Chandler Bing from NBC’s ’90s superhit sitcom Friends on the big screen, little did people know that he was actually struggling with drug addiction off-screen. And the fact that he was going through all this was only released a year prior to his death, which was reported on Saturday, October 28 by drowning in a hot tub in an L.A. area home.
In fact, his battle with drug abuse took such an ugly turn that Perry didn’t know how to stop. To get rehab to stop the opioid addiction that nearly got him killed, the actor even spent a whopping $9,000,000 just to get out of the struggle that drugs had gotten him into.
Matthew Perry Spent A Fortune To Get Rid Of Addiction That Nearly Killed Him
In October 2022, about a year before he was found dead after reportedly drowning in his jacuzzi, Matthew Perry shared in an interview with People ahead of the release of his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, how much he struggled to get sober following his out-of-control drug addiction.
During that, he mentioned how he was in a coma for two years, fighting for his life when he was 49, which was followed by not only a five-month stay at the hospital but also using a colostomy bag for about a year after an opioid overdose ended up with his colon bursting.
“[When I was first admitted to the hospital,] the doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live,” he recalled. “I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”
“I didn’t know how to stop,” he said. “If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail,’ I’d start packing. I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”
Matthew Perry’s Near-Death Experience Encouraged Him Toward Sobriety
Continuing in the interview, Matthew Perry then shared how much his emotional and physical journey following his harrowing trip to the hospital and near-death experience motivated him to get sober.
“My therapist said, ‘The next time you think about taking OxyContin, just think about having a colostomy bag for the rest of your life,'” he said. “And a little window opened, and I crawled through it, and I no longer want OxyContin.”
Not only did he quit drinking after that but the Chandler Bing portrayer also decided to share his mortifying fight with addiction to encourage other addicts to get sober as well through his memoir.
“I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again,” he said. “I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober — and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction — to write it all down. And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people.”
It’s truly incredible how much Matthew Perry cared about others to not want anyone else to go through the same pain and suffering that he went through.
“It’s important, but if you lose your sobriety, it doesn’t mean you lose all that time and education,” he noted. “Your sober date changes, but that’s all that changes. You know everything you knew before, as long as you were able to fight your way back without dying, you learn a lot.”
May your soul rest in peace, our beloved Chandler Bing.
