Matthew Perry once recalled that Jennifer Aniston kept in close contact with him throughout the ups and downs of his journey towards sobriety.
A year before his tragic death on Saturday (28 October), the Friends star, who was 54, opened up about the support he received from his co-star Aniston, 54, who played Rachel Green on the sitcom.
“She was the one that reached out the most. You know, I’m really grateful to her for that,” Perry told ABC News’s Diane Sawyer in an October 2022 interview.
He further revealed that Aniston was the first castmate to confront him about his alcoholism while filming the series, which ran from 1994 to 2004.
“Jennifer, she says, ‘We know you’re drinking,’” Sawyer said to Perry.
“Yeah, imagine how scary a moment that was,” the actor replied.
“I should have been the toast of the town, but I was in a dark room meeting with nothing but drug dealers and completely alone,” he said of his struggles with addiction.
Perry, who rose to fame starring as the affable wise-crack Chandler Bing on the long-running NBC sitcom, was found dead in his jacuzzi at his Los Angeles home on Saturday, 28 October.
There were no initial signs of foul play, police sources said. An investigation is ongoing.
In his poignant memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing — in which he chronicled his struggles with addiction along with memories of his career — Perry wrote that he first started drinking when he was 14.
He said that his addiction grew worse under the “white-hot flame of fame” after he starred in Friends. He was drinking heavily during the first two seasons, he wrote, before becoming addicted to the opiate pain medication Vicodin after a jetski accident while filming Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek in 1996.
At his worst moments, he would take 55 strong painkillers a day to get through filming. In his memoir, he disclosed that fans would have been able to tell whether he was drinking or taking drugs depending on his appearance: “When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills; when I have a goatee, it’s a lot of pills,” he said.