Chandler Bing. There aren't many people who do not know who Chandler Bing is. He is, of course, one of the six friends on Friends, the long-running sitcom from the late 90s/early 2000s that has become one of the most popular of all-time.
Chandler was the jokester, the wise-cracking funny guy of the group. Some of his lines are iconic, and are still repeated over and over again, in conversation, and on social media.
Matthew Perry was not Chandler Bing. Matthew is a great actor and has amazing comic timing. He played Chandler flawlessly, but his life off the Friends set, and since the show's ending, was nothing short of a nightmare.
Matthew Perry has written his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. In it, he describes his decades-long battle with drinking and drug use.
He sat down with ABC News anchor, Diane Sawyer for an in-depth interview on his memoir and his life.
8 Why Did Matthew Perry Write His Memoir?
Perry was very clear with Diane Sawyer - he wrote this memoir to help others, "It was important to me to do something to help other people."
The Friends star writes in his book, "Addiction, the 'big terrible thing' is far too powerful for anyone to defeat alone, but together, one day at a time, we can beat it down."
He also said, "For some reason, maybe because I was on Friends, maybe people will listen to me, so I've gotta take advantage of that, I've gotta help as many people as I can."
7 When Did Matthew Perry Start Drinking?
Matthew Perry grew up with "glamorous" parents. His dad, John Bennett Perry, was an actor and the very handsome face of the Old Spice commercials. His mom, Suzanne Perry, was the Press Secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. They divorced before Matthew was a year old. They each remarried and Matthew loved his stepparents and siblings but says he always felt lonely.
He began drinking at 14 years old at a party with friends. He said, "I lay in the grass and just...just was in heaven." His friends would drink and stop, but he could not. "By the time I was 18, I was drinking every day," he told Sawyer. He would drink with friends, and then buy a bottle of vodka on his way home and drink it alone.
6 How Did Matthew Perry Become Chandler Bing?
Matthew Perry liked school plays, so he moved to California to live with his dad and quickly got TV roles, even appearing on the mega hit, Beverly Hills, 90210.
When he was 24, he auditioned for a role in a new series, originally called, "Friends Like Us". He got the role of Chandler, and told producers about his anxiety and shyness with girls, so they decided to put that in his role. Chandler became "a character that couldn't stand silence, so he would make jokes," Perry said.
Matthew Perry was still drinking but said, "I made a rule, that I would never drink or take anything at work. So I would never do that, but I would show up blindly hungover, like shaking and crazy hungover." He also said he loved Chandler and the show. He told himself, "remember this, because it's gonna be the best time of your life."
5 When Matthew Perry Began Taking Pills
Matthew Perry says he remembers the first pill he took as well as he remembers his first drink.
He was making the movie, Fools Rush In, and suffered an injury on a jet ski. A doctor gave him a pill, which he said felt like "warm honey in his veins".
His book reads, "I swear to God I think if I'd never taken it, none of the next three decades would have gone the way they did. Who knows? I just know it was really bad."
The pills were Vicodin, and he thought they might help tame his drinking. He began taking more and more, so his body built up a tolerance, which made him need even more. At one point, he was up to 55 Vicodin a day. He was so desperate, he would go to "open houses", and steal pills from the bathrooms. He said no one realized because, "there's no way that Chandler came in and stole from us".
4 Did Matthew Perry Almost Die?
According to his memoir, Matthew Perry has been to 6,000 meetings, 15 rehabs and through detox 65 times.
He had a near-fatal experience when he was brought into an Emergency Trauma Center, where his colon exploded. Perry says he was put on an ecmo machine, which he calls a "Hail Mary", a last-ditch effort to save someone. He shared that there were five people that night put on an ecmo machine, and he was the only one to survive.
After that, he was in a coma for 14 days, and in the hospital for five months. He also ended up having 14 surgeries to repair the damage.
3 Matthew Perry On Dating
Matthew Perry says he always had a problem with women because he is horribly insecure. His pattern with relationships was "a combination of feeling like I wasn't enough, feeling like I was needy, feeling like I didn't matter."
He continued, "And so I'd be in relationships that were going great with wonderful women...wonderful women...smart, funny, wonderful women...and...my subconscious...I got scared , like I would get scared, and break up with them because I was afraid that if they found out those three things about me, they would break up with me, and that would annihilate me."
Through therapy, he has learned that he doesn't always need to be funny to keep a woman in his life. Perry also said he tried online dating, but it wasn't for him. He would like a relationship and hasn't ruled out becoming a father one day.
2 Matthew Perry Was In Rehab When He Was On Friends
During the final years of Friends, Matthew Perry was in rehab for three months. He was driven back and forth to the set.
"I was driven in a big blue pickup truck to marry Monica from a treatment center," he shared.
Diane Sawyer showed him Chandler and Monica's wedding scene. He smiled and said, "That was pretty good. I'll watch that scene over and over. That was good. I looked good, sober. Fun to watch".
He said he was sober at the end of Friends and stayed sober for a pretty long time. He was sometimes sober for a year or so at a time but it never lasted.
1 Matthew Perry On His Friends And The Reunion
Matthew Perry said that he met Jennifer Aniston years before they were on Friends and asked her out. She said no but wanted to be friends. And that they did. She was the one who represented the group when they told him they knew he was drinking.
Lisa Kudrow said about him, "Matthew Perry was always the one trying to keep everyone else happy."
Perry spoke of his love and admiration for all of his former cast members. But of himself, he said, "There were six friends, one of them was sick."
Perry revealed to Sawyer that he underwent emergency tooth surgery after losing his front teeth, just days before the Friends Reunion. He filmed the special anyway, although people were worried about him.
