Matthew Perry has revealed which of his Friends co-stars confronted him about his drinking problem.
The actor, who played Chandler Bing in the beloved sitcom, is set to open up about his battle with addiction and alcoholism in his upcoming memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, which is due for release on November 1.
Speaking in the trailer for his upcoming ABC News interview with Diane Sawyer, Matthew detailed his painful past, which at one point saw him drinking a litre of vodka a day.
“At the time I should have been the toast of the town, I was in a dark room meeting nothing but drug dealers and completely alone,” Matthew told Diane during the interview.
The actor recalled how his Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston approached him on set one day, and bluntly revealed that the entire cast ‘know you’re drinking’.
“Imagine how scary a moment that was,” he continued, adding that the actress who played Rachel Green helped him through his recovery.
Matthew reveals in his upcoming memoir that he started drinking heavily when he first joined the cast of Friends back in 1994.
When he was involved in a jet ski accident in 1997, he was prescribed the painkiller Vicodin and became reliant on it, despite his injuries healing.
The 53-year-old revealed he spent weeks in a hospital fighting for his life after his colon burst from opioid overuse.
Matthew told PEOPLE: “I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again.”
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“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.”
In his memoir, the actor reveals he spent two weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.
He says that when he was first admitted to the hospital, “the doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live. 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.”
He told PEOPLE of his addiction: “I didn’t know how to stop. 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.”
The 53-year-old has been to rehab 15 times and had 14 surgeries on his stomach so far.
Matthew said fans who read his book will “be surprised at how bad it got at certain times and how close to dying I came”.
He continued: “I say in the book that if I did die, it would shock people, but it wouldn’t surprise anybody. And that’s a very scary thing to be living with. So my hope is that people will relate to it, and know that this disease attacks everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re successful or not successful, the disease doesn’t care.”
“I’m an extremely grateful guy. I’m grateful to be alive, that’s for sure. And that gives me the possibility to do anything.”
“What I’m most surprised with is my resilience. The way that I can bounce back from all of this torture and awfulness. Wanting to tell the story, even though it’s a little scary to tell all your secrets in a book, I didn’t leave anything out. Everything’s in there.”
Matthew added that his story is one “that’s filled with hope. Because here I am.”
