Friends star Matthew Perry, who was found dead in Los Angeles on October 28, published a book last year detailing his battle with addiction and revealing some alarming secrets. In his book, entitled “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” he wrote that he traveled to a rehab clinic in Switzerland in the hopes of defeating his addictions to alcohol and painkillers.
The night before a scheduled surgery to help with pain, he spent the evening swallowing prescription painkillers. When surgeons anesthetized him the following morning, his heart stopped beating, forcing doctors to perform CPR to revive him.
In 2018, the star underwent seven-hour surgery to repair a ruptured colon. Doctors gave him a mere 2% chance of making it through the night, and he spent the next six months in hospital recovering.
Perry also opened up about his brief relationship with movie superstar Julia Roberts, saying he did not believe he was good enough for her, so he ended the relationship before she could. “Instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts,” he wrote.
The actor’s relationship with alcohol began when he was just 14 years old. He shared a bottle of sparkling wine with some friends, and while it made him vomit, he still wrote that he had never felt so happy as when he first got drunk. “This is the answer, I thought; this is what I’ve been missing,” he said.
He moved from Canada to live with his actor father in Los Angeles at the age of 15 and wrote that his father also had problems with alcohol, which exacerbated his own. Perry developed an addiction to painkillers after a doctor prescribed Vicodin following a jetski accident. Within 18 months, he was taking 55 Vicodin pills per day.
The exact cause of Perry’s death has not been revealed, but paramedics confirm they found him unresponsive in a hot tub at his home.
