He started drinking at the age of 14. By the age of 18, he was already drinking every day. In the book, he describes in chilling detail the critical moment in the life of every alcoholic when he first realizes that he needs a drink. In Chandler’s case, that moment came when he was 21 years old. He tried many times to stop drinking, and he succeeded for three days, then for two weeks. At the age of 27, on the set of the film “Hurry Fools” with Salma Hayek, after an accident, he was prescribed his first Vicodin. A year later, he took them by the handful, fueling his insecurities. This led him, among other things, to divorce Julia Roberts. Since one day she was going to divorce him – he was sure of it – he had to catch up with her.

In his 30s, he developed pancreatitis due to alcohol and spent 30 days in the hospital. There he learned about Dilaudid, which became his new drug of choice. Starting to abuse, he believed that success would save him. At the peak of his career, he realized that it was not a celebrity that filled the void inside him, but vodka. “You have to see all your dreams come true to understand that these are the wrong dreams,” he writes.

Matthew Perry, aged 53, is stripping, wearing no makeup, hiding nothing, an ugly naked guy who doesn’t care who looks at him. “You can follow the trajectory of my addiction by calculating my weight from season to season. When I’m heavy, it’s alcohol, when I’m too skinny, it’s pills,” he writes. “When I have a beard, it’s a lot of pills,” he adds with a Chandler-style climax that relaxes the mood.

What it’s like to lose 20 pounds in… a night

At various times in the series, Matthew Perry weighed from 58 kg (“The Episode on the Beach”, at the end of the third season) to 100 kg (“The Episode with the Proposal”, at the end of the 6th season). In between seasons, without day-to-day filming to maintain elemental balance, he sank deeper and deeper into addiction. “Watch the last episode of season 6 and the first episode of season 7 – Chandler’s proposal to Monica. I wear the same clothes since it was supposed to happen on the same night, but during this time I lost more than 20 kilograms.”

When Monica and Chandler’s wedding was being filmed, Perry was admitted to a rehab facility, from where he was specially dressed for the role in the scene.

In this chaos, only one rule was observed. He did not drink and never took pills at work. It was the least he could do for the best team of like-minded people he could imagine, for the best job in the world, without which he would hardly be alive today. He was “present” – often with a manic hangover or trembling – on the set of each of the 237 episodes in those 10 years, regardless of whether entire seasons were lost due to memory lapses. He clearly remembers two things. Once Jennifer Aniston came to his dressing room and said: “I know what you drink.” “How did you understand it;” he asked her, not even trying to deny it. “We can smell it,” she said softly. “That first plural hit me like a sledgehammer,” writes Perry.

He didn’t even have time to cry on the last shoot. “I didn’t know if it was because of the buprenorphine or if I was emotionally dead.”

The second moment was when “it’s a wrapper” was last heard, in the last episode of the entire series. “Jennifer Aniston was crying so hard that after a while I wondered if there was water left in her entire body. Even Matt Le Blanc cried. But I’m nothing. I didn’t know if it was because of the buprenorphine (an opioid drug used to get rid of harder opioids) or if I was just emotionally dead.” Notably, Chandler couldn’t cry either, as Monica accused him of being dead inside.

As he recounts in the book, only one season of Friends made him completely sober up, the ninth, which, not coincidentally, was the only one in which he was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy. Surprisingly, Matthew Perry has only been nominated for an Emmy Award four times, three of them for dramatic performances (for a guest appearance on The West Wing and a starring role in The Ron Clark Story). “What did I do differently that season?” Perry wonders in his memoirs. “I listened. I didn’t just sit and wait for my turn to speak.” However, he swept again the following year.

Today he is clean. He was lucky: 4 years ago, his colon “exploded” due to opioids, which was both the worst and the best thing that could have happened to him. He was 49 years old and lived in a rehabilitation center. He fell into a coma for two weeks, and doctors gave him only a 2% chance of recovery. As a result, he lay in the hospital for five whole months, during which time he underwent 14 operations, while living in an unnatural position for nine months. The bag broke 55 times. “It’s a lot of reminders to stay sober,” writes Matthew Perry, who, like the show, wants to have the last word on life.