Roughly 20 years after the hit US sitcom’s finale, “friends(“Friends”), oh Matthew Perry says he can’t see himself as Chandler Bing and it has nothing to do with the hit TV comedy.

For Perry, the Emmy-winning sitcom reminds him of his struggles with addiction and alcohol, as he recently told CBC’s Tom Power.

“I didn’t watch the show and I never did because I remembered who I was season after season.” The interview came more than a month after the release of his first book, Friends, Lovers and the Big Bad Thing. There he writes about Chandler Bing, his romance with Julia Roberts, and more.

Among other things, his memoir describes the actor’s experience with sobriety. However, alcohol was not the only problem Perry faced while filming the series, which began in 1994 and ran for 10 years.

“I was on 55 opioid painkillers (Vicodin) a day, weighed about 60 pounds, the show was watched by 30 million people and that’s why I can’t watch the episode – because I was alarmingly thin and struggling.”

To overcome his addiction and mental health issues, Perry joined various rehab programs. In 1997, at the Betty Ford Haselden Center in Minnesota, he learned important information that helped him recover. Someone reminded him that addiction was not his problem. “It was not that I want to be “destroyed”, but that I have this disease and I need help,” said the actor.

According to the Los Angeles Times