Matthew Perry hit rock bottom while filming iconic Friends Chandler-Monica wedding episode

Fans swooned when Chandler married Monica on Friends. But behind the scenes, tragic star Matthew Perry had hit rock bottom.

To his millions of fans and his Hollywood friends, he was a comic genius and one of the funniest men on earth.

But behind the smiles and laughter, actor Matthew Perry struggled with a devastating addiction to opioids and alcohol, triggered by a need to quell the anxieties that consumed him.

Through his portrayal of the wisecracking Chandler Bing in the TV sitcom Friends, he brought belly laughs to viewers in the pre-internet world of “appointment television”.

As the news of his shock death aged 54 from an apparent drowning at his home in Los Angeles emerged, those who remembered racing home to catch the latest episode of Friends – and the quirky antics of the sarcastic Chandler – mourned the loss of not just a dazzling performer, but a certain part of their youth.

Matthew Perry shot to global fame as Chandler Bing on Friends.

As for the iconic role which shot him to global stardom as a 24-year-old, Perry said he knew the part was made for him even before he landed an audition.

“It wasn’t that I thought I could play ‘Chandler,’ I was Chandler,” he wrote in his memoir.

But like so many of the comedy legends who came before him, the sad irony was that while the world laughed and delighted in Perry’s unmatchable gifts, the seemingly upbeat star was tormented by inner demons.

The beloved actor, with Courteney Cox, won countless fans as the sarcastic Chandler Bing. Picture: Getty Images

The charismatic star battled substance abuse issues for decades. Picture: Getty Images

At the much-hyped Friends reunion in 2021, the once dashing Perry, who worried fans with his slurred speech and sluggish appearance, gave his five castmates an insight into the heart-racing insecurities he faced daily during the smash-hit show’s ten-year run from 1994 to 2004.

When he stepped in front of the Friends’ live studio audience, Perry told co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer, he “felt like I was gonna die if they didn’t laugh”.

“And it’s not healthy for sure, but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh – and I would sweat and just go into convulsions if I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get. I would freak out …. I felt like that every single night.”

This crushing battle with anxiety appears to have plagued the star up until his shock death, with police finding a mix of prescription drugs and anti-anxiety medications at the scene of his death.

Matthew Perry’s appearance on the Friends reunion worried fans. Picture: HBO Max/YouTube

In his best-selling 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry laid it all bare, giving readers an insight into the multiple times he hit rock bottom.

In his searingly honest fashion, the star was blunt about how addiction had ruined his life, memorably opening his autobiography with a frank admission. “My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead,” he wrote.

The kind-hearted star wanted to help others battling addiction. Picture: AFP

The ‘Big Terrible Thing’ was the drugs and alcohol addiction that had plagued and defined him since he started drinking heavily as a 14-year-old growing up in Ottawa, Canada.

Perry estimated in his book that he had spent around $14 million trying to get sober in a lifelong journey that included 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, 15 stints in rehab and 65 stays in a detox unit.

Matthew Perry, pictured in the early days of Friends, battled with alcoholism from a young age. Picture: Getty Images

He recalled the life-changing moment he experienced after a night out when he was a Hollywood newbie partying with close friends including actors Craig Bierko and Hank Azaria, who last week mourned his late friend’s tragic loss and credited Perry with helping him get sober.

“All of sudden this creeping feeling came over me for the first time,” Perry wrote. “I felt my blood on fire for more to drink; I really wanted another drink, and I could think of nothing else. It was that night when I first felt the obsession for alcohol.”

Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek in the 1997 film Fools Rush In. He was prescribed pills while filming the movie and later said it was the beginning of his descent into addiction.

Alcoholism eventually led to prescription pill abuse when Perry was prescribed Vicodin on the set of the 1997 film Fools Rush In after a jet ski accident.

He likened the drug to warm honey entering his veins and pinpointed that moment as the beginning of his downfall.

Matthew Perry’s weight plummeted in 1997 as he popped 55 Vicodin pills per day.

“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?” Perry wrote in his memoir.

He ended up popping up to 55 pills per day, he wrote, which resulted in his wildly fluctuating weight while on Friends.

The star later said he felt it hard to watch old episodes of the show due to his painfully thin appearance.

“You can track the trajectory of addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,” Perry wrote in his memoir. “If I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.”

Jennifer Aniston, during her time on Friends, tried to help her castmate with his struggles.

Perry revealed he hit a major low at the highest point of his career when a “sober technician” was drafted in to help him film one of his most iconic episodes, the wedding of Chandler and Monica.

He wrote how he shot the famous scenes while being moved from a rehab clinic to the Promises treatment centre in Malibu, where he was told he would need months more to recover.

Fans swooned when Chandler married Monica - but few knew the drama that was going on behind the scenes.

“Two weeks later, I was driven to the set of Friends by a technician from Malibu,” Perry wrote of his arrival for the two-part episode of season 7.

“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment centre — at the height of my highest point in Friends, the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pick-up truck helmed by a sober technician,” he added.

Matthew Perry was being transferred between rehab centres while filming the famous Friends wedding episode.

His Friends castmates – who described themselves as “a family” as they told of their “unfathomable loss” in a joint statement last week – were concerned enough to intervene, with Aniston at one point confronting Perry on the set of Friends by telling him, “I know you’re drinking … we can smell it.”

In footage that has resurfaced after Perry’s death, Aniston wept in a 2004 interview with Diane Sawyer when she addressed the issue of Perry’s drug and alcohol addiction, saying the Friends cast were “not equipped” to deal with it.

Kudrow echoed this feeling of helplessness in the foreword she wrote for Perry’s memoir, saying she “didn’t really try to intervene or confront him, because the little I knew about addiction was that his sobriety was out of my hands”.

Perry revealed he had long harboured romantic feelings for Aniston and said his “awkward” crush was indicative of his obsession with “unavailable women”, which he put down to his strained relationship with his glamorous mother and the trauma of his parents’ divorce.

Matthew Perry fell for superstar Julia Roberts but later said he broke it off due to feelings of insecurity.

He dramatically ended a short-lived relationship with Julia Roberts after wooing her with red roses when she agreed to play the guest role of Chandler’s former classmate on Friends in 1996.

Despite falling for Roberts, Perry abruptly broke up with her due to his fear that he wasn’t good enough and she would dump him for being “broken, bent, unlovable”.

“Instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts,” he wrote.

The star dated some of Hollywood’s most beautiful women, including Neve Campbell. He later said his drinking wrecked their romance.

His following relationships with a series of Hollywood stars — including Neve Campbell, Yasmine Bleeth, Lauren Graham, Heather Graham and Lizzy Caplan — only ended in heartache.

His final high-profile relationship with literary agent Molly Hurwitz, was disastrous. He described how he proposed to Hurwitz in 2021 when he was “high as a kite” during a stay at a Swiss rehab clinic and broke up with her just months later.

The star proposed to former fiancee Molly Hurwitz when he was in rehab.

On the day before he died, the star was spotted enjoying an intimate lunch with a mystery woman at the Hotel Bel-Air, who later came forward to reveal herself as model Athenna Crosby.

At the time of his death, Perry was believed to have been sober having sworn off drugs after a terrifying brush with death in 2019.

His colon exploded due to opioid abuse and he was warned he would have to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life if he continued abusing drugs.

Perry lived out his final days in his Pacific Palisades home surrounded by a loyal inner circle that appeared to protect him from the outside world and included an assistant, personal trainer and sober coach.

Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman told America’s Today show she spoke to the star just two weeks before his death, saying he seemed “happy, chipper and not weighed down by anything.”

“He was in a really good place, which is why this seems so unfair,” she said.