Matthew Perry: How to tell which drugs I used on Friends

Friends star Matthew Perry explains in his forthcoming memoir how to tell which drugs he was using throughout the hit series.

Matthew Perry writes in his forthcoming memoir that his changing appearance throughout 10 seasons of Friends serves as a dead giveaway for which drugs he was using at the time.

“You can track the trajectory for my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,” the actor writes in Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing out November 1.

“When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.”

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Perry was chomping down as many as 55 Vicodin tablets a day. Picture: NBCU

Perry, 53, shares that by the end of the third season of the hit NBC sitcom, on which he played Chandler Bing, he was trying to obtain 55 Vicodin a day — otherwise he’d get “so sick”.

The Three to Tango star attributes his extremely thin frame to his opioid addiction, as the drugs suppress appetite and cause vomiting.

He writes that his weight varied between 58kg and 102kg over the course of the series.

“When I’m skinny, it’s pills,” Perry writes. Picture: NBCU

Perry’s memoir also reveals that one of his stints in rehab took place immediately after filming his wedding to Monica Geller (Courteney Cox). Perry shares that he was immediately “driven back to the treatment centre … in a pick-up truck helmed by a sober technician” after the scene wrapped.

Despite his best efforts to get sober, the “17 Again” star suffered a near-fatal health scare in 2019 when his colon burst because of the massive quantities of opioids he was injecting.

“When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills,” he continues. Picture: NBCU

“I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs,” Perry recently told People. “And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”

Perry says he’s now 18 months sober, thanks in part to never wanting to have to live with a colostomy bag again.

This article was originally published by Page Six and reproduced with permission