Matthew Perry Reveals How Jennifer Aniston Confronted Him About His Substance Abuse

Matthew Perry continues to share candid moments from his long journey to sobriety and the struggles he endured during his run on NBC’s “Friends” as he vacillated between addictions to Vicodin and alcohol.

In an excerpt from her new book “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry recounts how a visit from co-star Jennifer Aniston to her trailer made her realize that her secret behavior when it came to alcohol wasn’t so secret.

“‘I know you’re drinking,’ he said,” Perry, now 53, writes in the memoir, in an excerpt published by the london times.

“I got over her a long time ago, ever since she started dating Brad Pitt, she was fine, and I had calculated exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward, but still being confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating. And I was confused.” continuous.

“‘How can you know?’ I said. I’ve never worked drunk. ‘I’ve been trying to hide it…'”

Elsewhere in the excerpt, Perry mentioned that he “never” worked drugged or drunk (although he “certainly worked hungover”), saying that he was largely able to function as part of the hit “Friends” group thanks to his co-stars. and how “they would cluster around [him] and support [him] up” like a wounded penguin supported by other penguins.

“I was the injured penguin, but I was determined not to let these wonderful people and this show down,” he wrote.

But that day in Perry’s trailer, Aniston made it clear that she wasn’t going to get away with it.

“‘We can smell it,’ he said, in a strange but endearing way, and the plural ‘we’ hit me like a sledgehammer,” Perry wrote.

“‘I know I’m drinking too much,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know exactly what to do about it.'”

The “Whole Nine Yards” star also describes in the new book how his weight fluctuated wildly because pills made him sick and dull his appetite, or alcohol made him bloated.

“You can trace the trajectory of my addiction if you measure my weight from season to season: when I’m carrying weight, it’s booze; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s a lot of pills.”

Perry even referenced specific points in the hit show’s 10 seasons and hinted at what was going on with her addiction at the time.

“By the end of season three, I was spending most of my time thinking about how to get 55 Vicodin a day; I had to take 55 every day, otherwise I’d get so sick. It was a full-time job: making calls, watching doctors, faking migraines, finding crooked nurses to give me what I needed,” Perry wrote.

The actor said recently he’s finally ready to share his experiences now that he’s safe from the other side of addiction.

“I wanted to share when I was safe from re-entering the dark side of it all,” Perry told People about the book. “I had to wait until I was pretty sober, and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction, to write it all down. And the main thing was that I was pretty sure it would help people.”

Matthew Perry’s “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will be published by Headline on November 1.

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