You know how during Covid some people felt like they were living the same day over and over and over again?
Here’s the day I wish I could live over and over again (this is the Groundhog Day of my Groundhog Day). In fact, I wish I could relive it every day for the rest of my life. But I cannot. So, the only way to get past it is to tell it like a story, see if that helps.
(This of course will not bring it back.)
It was New Year’s Eve 1995, Taos, New Mexico. All afternoon we’d been playing football in the snow. Me, and my girlfriend, Julia Roberts, and a bunch of our friends. She was the biggest movie star in the world, and I was on the number one show on TV.
The courtship had initially been conducted via fax. Somewhere in the world, there is a stack of faxes about two feet long—a two-foot-long courtship, filled with poems and flights of fancy and two huge stars falling for each other and connecting in a beautiful, romantic way.
At the time, I was walking on air. I was the center of it all and nothing could touch me. The white-hot flame of fame was mine—I kept passing my hand through it, but it didn’t burn yet; it was the inert center. I had not learned yet that fame would not fill the hole, but at the time it filled it just nicely, thank you very much.
Season one of Friends had been a smash hit, and I had basically floated into season two. I’d done Letterman; I was slated to do Leno. We’d hit the cover of People magazine and Rolling Stone magazine when both were a big deal. Now, the movie offers were coming in. Why would they not? I was getting anything I wanted. Million-dollar movie offer here, million-dollar movie offer there. I was no Julia Roberts, but there was only one of those.
Then something that only happens to famous people happened. Marta Kauffman approached me and said that I should probably send flowers to Julia Roberts.
You mean the biggest-star-in-the-universe Julia Roberts?
“Sure, great, why?” I said.
Turned out Julia had been offered the post–Super Bowl episode in season two and she would only do the show if she could be in my story line. Let me say that again—she would only do the show if she could be in my story line. (Was I having a good year or what?) But first, I had to woo her.
I thought long and hard about what to say on the card. I wanted it to sound professional, star to star. (Well, star to much bigger star.) But I wanted something a tad flirty in there, too, to match what she had said. I’m still proud of what I settled on. I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read:
The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers.
Not bad right? I was afraid to go to sleep at night, but I could pour on the charm when called for. But my work here was far from done. Her reply was that if I adequately explained quantum physics to her, she’d agree to be on the show. Wow. First of all, I’m in an exchange with the woman for whom lipstick was invented, and now I have to hit the books.
The following day, I sent her a paper all about wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle and entanglement, and only some of it was metaphorical. Alexa Junge, a staff writer on the show, told The Hollywood Reporter many years later that “[Julia] was interested in [Matthew] from afar because he’s so charming. There was a lot of flirting over faxing. She was giving him these questionnaires like, ‘Why should I go out with you?’ And everyone in the writers’ room helped him explain to her why. He could do pretty well without us, but there was no question we were on Team Matthew and trying to make it happen for him.”
In the end, all our efforts worked. Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift: bagels—lots and lots of bagels. Sure, why not? It was Julia fucking Roberts.
Thus began a three-month-long courtship by daily faxes. This was pre-internet, pre–cell phones—all our exchanges were done by fax. And there were many; hundreds. At first, it was the edges of romance: I sent her poems, asked her to name the triple crown line on the Los Angeles Kings, that kind of thing. And it wasn’t like we weren’t both busy—I was shooting the most popular show on the planet, and she was shooting a Woody Allen movie, Everyone Says I Love You, in France. (Of course she was.) But three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive. I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of ten, one had. They were so smart—the way she strung sentences together, the way she saw the world, the way she articulated her unique thoughts, all was so captivating. It wasn’t uncommon for me to read these faxes three, four, sometimes five times, grinning at that paper like some kind of moron. It was like she was placed on this planet to make the world smile, and now, in particular, me. I was grinning like some fifteen-year-old on his first date.
And we had never even spoken yet, much less met each other.
Then early one morning, something changed. Julia’s fax veered romantic. I called a friend and said, “I’m in over my head. You have to come over right away. Tell me if I’m wrong.”
When he arrived, I showed him the fax and he said, “Yup, you are not wrong. You are most certainly in over your head.”
“What am I supposed to send back?”
“Well, how do you feel?”
“Oh, fuck off,” I said, “just tell me what to say.”
So, “Cyrano” and I compiled and sent a fax that veered romantic, too. Then we stood there, by the fax machine, looking at each other. Two men just staring at a machine.
After about ten minutes, the jarring sound of the fax machine—all bongs and whirrs and hissing messages from outer space—filled my apartment.
“Call me,” it said, and her phone number was at the bottom.
I picked up the phone and called Julia Roberts. I was nervous as hell, as nervous as my first appearance on Letterman. But the conversation went easy—I made her laugh, and man, what a laugh.… She was clearly extremely smart, a big intellect. I could tell already that she was easily in the top three of storytellers that I had ever met, too. Her stories were so good, in fact, that at one point I asked her if she had written them out ahead of time.
Five and half hours later, as we came to a close, I realized I wasn’t nervous anymore. After that we could not be stopped—five-hour conversations here, four-hour conversations there. We were falling; I wasn’t sure into what, but we were falling.
It was clear that we were in deep smit.
One Thursday, my phone rang again.
“I’ll be at your house at two P.M., Saturday.”
Click.
And there we had it.
How did she even know where I lived? What if she didn’t like me? What if the faxes and the phone calls were all really cute but when it came to real life, she didn’t want me anymore?
Why can’t I stop drinking?
Sure enough, at 2:00 P.M. that Saturday, there was a knock on my door. Deep breaths, Matty. When I opened it, there she was, there was a smiling Julia Roberts on the other side.
I believe I said something like:
“Oh, that Julia Roberts.”
Even in moments like this, the jokes just flew by. Craig would have said it faster, but he wasn’t there. She laughed that Julia Roberts laugh, the one that could launch a thousand ships. And any tension seemed to just vaporize.
She asked me how I was doing.
“I’m feeling like the luckiest man in the world. How are you doing?”
“You should probably invite me in now.”
I did let her in, both figuratively and literally, and a relationship began. We would already be a couple by the time we started filming the Friends Super Bowl episode.
But before we filmed it, it was New Year’s Eve, in Taos. It was about to be 1996. I was dating Julia Roberts. I’d even met her family. She picked me up in her orange Volkswagen Beetle, after flying me there privately. I thought I had money. She had money.
We’d played football in the snow all day. Later, Julia looked at me, looked at her watch—11:45 P.M.—took my hand, and said, “Come with me.”
We jumped in this big blue truck and drove up a mountain, snow swirling around. I had no idea where we were going. We seemed to be heading up into the very stars themselves. Eventually, we reached a mountaintop, and for a moment the weather cleared, and we could see New Mexico and beyond, all the way back to Canada. As we sat there, she made me feel like the king of the world. A gentle snow was falling, and with that, 1996 began.
In February, Julia went on Letterman, and he pressed her on whether or not we were dating. She had just guest starred in the Friends episode “The One After the Super Bowl.” That episode—replete as it was with guest stars like Julia, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Brooke Shields, and Chris Isaak, among others—was viewed by 52.9 million people, the most watched show ever to follow a Super Bowl. The ad revenue alone was staggering—more than half a million dollars for thirty seconds of airtime. The show was now solidly NBC’s major cash cow.
(And yet, I can still recall a couple of nights thinking, I wish I was on ER instead of Friends. I could never get enough attention. The problem was still there, my fingerprint, the color of my eyes.)
We’d filmed Julia’s part of the double episode a few days after New Year’s—January 6 to 8. They’d written lines for me like, “Back then, I used humor as a defense mechanism—thank God I don’t do that anymore,” and “I’ve met the perfect woman.” Our kiss on the couch was so real people thought it was real.
It was. She was wonderful on the show, and our chemistry seemed to seep off televisions all across America.
To answer Letterman, Julia yet again proved her smarts by fucking with everyone:
“Yes, I’ve been going out with Matthew Perry, and for some reason, maybe because I did the Super Bowl show, people think it is the Matthew Perry from Friends. But, in fact, it’s this haberdasher I met in Hoboken. But Matthew Perry from Friends is nice, too, so I don’t mind that mistake.”
She also called me “awfully clever and funny and handsome.”
Everything back then was a yes.
Once we’d wrapped season two, in April I headed to Vegas to shoot my first major movie. I was being paid a million dollars to star in Fools Rush In, with Salma Hayek. To this day, it’s probably my best movie.
If I were doing that movie now, I would travel with three people, mostly because I am scared to be alone. But back then, it was just me. I wasn’t filled with fear the way I would be now. I think that’s why they send young people off to war. They are young—they aren’t scared; they are invincible.
Don’t get me wrong, I was nervous about making Fools Rush In. There I was, in Vegas, with a $30 million movie on my shoulders. On the first day, I was being driven home and said to the driver, “You have to pull over.” He did, and I threw up from fear, right there by the side of the road.
On a movie, not only is the work done slower, but it also only works if you really are actually feeling what you’re trying to portray as a feeling. This deeper work can be hard to transition to, and I found it more difficult, because on movies you tend to shoot scenes out of order.
I remember on day two of Fools Rush In we were shooting a scene at the obstetrician’s office, hearing our baby’s heartbeat for the first time. I had no idea how to get the feeling for it, given that I’d just met Salma. Later, I remember there was a scene that called for me to cry. I was very scared about that, too. I thought about it all day long and worried about it all night. I ended up by pulling it off, somehow. The trick is easy—you think of something that makes you feel really sad. But the timing is difficult, because you have to do it at exactly the right time, and you have to do it over and over again.
That day, I had been crying all day on the set of Fools Rush In. I went up to Andy Tennant, the director, and said, “We’ve been doing this for ten hours, man. I’ve got nothing left in me.”
Andy said, “We need it two more times, buddy.”
The prospect of this made me burst into tears. We both laughed and agreed that there must be a little more in the tank. (I actually find dramatic acting easier to do than comedic acting. I look at a scene and think, I don’t have to be funny? This will be a snap. I have been nominated for four Emmys in my life so far. One in comedy, and three in drama.)
But I was starting to come up with some fun strategies to tap into real feelings and to be more of a leading man than a funny sitcom actor. At noon at the Stratosphere Hotel in Vegas they have a big firework show—I told Salma to look at the hotel then because that was how my character felt when he first met her character.
Salma had tried her best, too—she came into my trailer at the start of the shoot and said, “Let’s just spoon a little bit.”
I did my best Chandler impression—the double-take-and-sardonic-stare thing—and said, “Oh, OK! Let’s just spoon a little bit!”
Salma always had a very elaborate and lengthy idea about how to do a scene, but her long-winded ideas weren’t always helpful. There’s one scene in which I’m professing my love for her. She suggested that we don’t look at each other—rather, we should look out at our future together. After listening to this nonsense for about twenty minutes, I finally said: “Listen, Salma,” I said, “I’m telling you I love you in this scene. You look wherever you want, but I’m going to be looking at you.”
Throughout the making of the movie, I had been going through the script and pitching jokes to Andy Tennant, who was a very smart and incredibly nice guy. He sat on me—I was bouncing around doing my funny little things, and he would take me aside and say, “You don’t have to do that. You’re interesting enough to watch without doing that.”
That line of thinking allowed him to pull out of me one of the best performances of my career. Could this be a different way of saying Matty, you’re enough, the words I’ve been longing to hear my entire life? (Andy went on to direct dozens of movies, including Hitch, starring Will Smith. Nice guys don’t finish last, I guess.)
Andy was also open to hearing pitch ideas. One day my friend Andrew Hill Newman was visiting me on set and came up with the line, “You are everything I never knew that I always wanted.” I wrote it out and handed it to Andy Tennant, who loved it, and it became the most famous line in the movie. And movie-wise, probably the best line I ever said.
One day during shooting there had been a bunch of people in the background on Lake Mead on Jet Skis, and I asked if I could ride one during the lunch break. But this was the start of the movie, and I was told it was too dangerous.
But everything back then was a yes … so I just said, “Erm, you have to say yes to that.”
So, I headed out onto Lake Mead. The sun was high; the blue water crackled like a flame. As I zoomed around on the Jet Ski, in the distance I could see the Hoover Dam, where the climax of the movie would be shot, and Mount Wilson hovering over everything like a warning. But everything in my life was perfect. I had the most beautiful, famous woman in the world as my girlfriend; I was on the number one TV show in America; I was making a lot of money shooting a movie that could only be a number one box-office smash. I revved that Jet Ski hard, feeling the loose-soft connection to the water, turning this way and that, the chop bumping me up and down on the seat, my right hand turning and turning and turning, pushing that machine to its limit.
And then I turned the Jet Ski hard right, but my body went straight on. I was airborne, and then I was not airborne. Once I surfaced, I looked back to where I’d started, and there stood forty people on the shoreline, the entire crew, who had been watching me risk the entire movie, and who now all dove into Lake Mead to get me.
When I got back to shore, I knew I was hurt. That night, there was a big scene to shoot—the birth-of-the-baby scene, the key moment—and I had to be right for it. But everything was hurting; I had especially fucked up my neck. The crew knew I was struggling, so they called a doctor, who came by my trailer and handed me a single pill in a plastic package.
“Take this when you’re done,” the doctor said. “Everything will be fine.”
I stashed that pill in my pocket, and 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? I just know it was really bad.
My character in Fools Rush In is a real estate developer who drives a red Mustang. The scene that night went on and on, but just before dawn we wrapped. I could sense the sun edging closer to the horizon.
“Hey, can I drive that Mustang home to Vegas, do you think?” I asked.
I’m amazed, after the Jet Ski debacle, that they said yes to anything right then. But they did.
The first light of that Nevada day was creeping over Mount Wilson when I left the lot. I put the top down of that Mustang and swallowed the pill. I thought about Julia; I thought about flying across Lake Mead, not a care in the world. I thought about my childhood, but it didn’t hurt, not then. As the pill kicked in, something clicked in me. And it’s been that click I’ve been chasing the rest of my life. I thought about fame and Craig Bierko and the Murray brothers and Friends. The summer was coming up, all pink cirrus clouds and soft, desert air. This was my pink sky. I felt so good that if a locomotive hit me, I would simply turn to the engineer and say, “It happens, brother.” I was lying in the grass in Canada in my backyard, surrounded once again with Murray puke. I couldn’t believe how good I felt; I was in complete and pure euphoria. The pill had replaced the blood in my body with warm honey. I was on top of the world. It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had. Nothing could ever go wrong. As I drove that red Mustang convertible to my rented house in Vegas, I remember thinking, If this doesn’t kill me, I’m doing this again. This is a bad memory, of course, because of what followed, but it was also a good memory. I was close to God that morning. I had felt heaven—not many people get that. I shook hands with God that morning.
Was it God, or someone else?
My first move when I got home that morning was to get in touch with that doctor and tell him that the pill had worked for the pain (I decided to leave that God part out). I went to sleep, and when I woke up, forty more of those pills had been delivered to my house. Eureka!
Be careful, Matty, something that feels that good must come with consequences. I know the consequences now—boy, do I ever. But I didn’t know them then. I wish that was all there was to say about Fools Rush In. Fun, inside-baseball stories about how movies get made. Hate to burst the celebrity-industrial complex bubble, but there are real lives going on, too, behind the glamour and the martini shots and the A-cameras. However, what no one could tell was that someone’s life, probably the least likely candidate, was about to plummet into the gates of hell.
A year and a half later, I was taking fifty-five of those pills a day. I weighed 128 pounds when I checked into Hazelden rehab in Minnesota, my life in ruins. I was in raw fear, certain I was going to die, having no idea what had happened to me. I wasn’t trying to die; I was just trying to feel better.
Of course, “Matthew Perry is in rehab” became a huge news story. I was not even granted the opportunity to work out my problems in privacy. Everyone knew. It was on the covers of all the magazines—I didn’t even get the anonymity everyone else got. I was terrified. I was also young, so I bounced back quickly. Within twenty-eight days, I was back on my feet again and looking healthy.
This was a big news story, too, but nowhere near the size of the other one.
Making movies is a completely different animal from making TV. On Friends, if you were sad about something you’d play it up, as though you’re the saddest person in the world—basically, for the back row of the live audience. There’s sort of a wink to the audience in your performance, too, as if to say, “Hey, everybody, watch this. You’re going to enjoy this.” When you do a sitcom, it’s like you’re doing a one-act play every week. There are three hundred people in the audience, and you have to open up to them.
Film work is much, much slower—there’s a master shot and then a closeup, and then an even closer closeup. And if your character was sad, you played him sad. There was no winking—this was the pros, baby. But on Friends we even rehearsed quickly. I remember Alec Baldwin guest starring once and saying, “You guys are going so fast!”
There were guest stars all the time, which meant we always had to think on our feet. Sean Penn was one of my favorites—he appeared in two episodes in season eight and nailed it. His story line called for me to be dressed up as a pink bunny rabbit (it was Halloween), so at the end of the table read, I said, “I’ve always dreamed of working with Sean Penn, but I never thought I’d have to wear a pink bunny rabbit suit to do so.”
Despite not having an actual fourth wall of the apartment, Friends never broke the metaphorical fourth wall, either. The closest we ever got was with Sean—I had pitched a tag (the brief end scene after the main story has landed) that had me backstage in the bunny rabbit suit. Sean walks by and I say, “Sean, can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure, Matthew, what’s up?”
“Well, I’ve been really giving this a lot of thought. And I think you’re a good person to talk to about this.” I’m smoking as I say this, and as I put the cigarette out with my huge bunny foot, I say, “I’ve been looking to transition myself into dramatic work.”
Sean Penn looks me up and down for about five beats and just says, “Good luck.”
It got a great laugh at the table read. But it broke a rule we never broke in ten years. Even someone as powerful as Sean Penn and me looking ridiculous in a huge pink bunny costume could not get the go-ahead to break the fourth wall. It stayed in place. Right where it should be.
Everybody had their particular years on Friends when the whole world was talking about their character. David Schwimmer’s was the first season; season two, it was Lisa; seasons five and six were Courteney and me; Jen was seasons seven and eight, and Matt (Most Improved Friend) was nine and ten. Some of them won Emmys for those seasons and all of us should have won more than we did, but I think there’s a bias against attractive rich people with an apartment that’s way too big for reality in New York City … except, as I always pointed out, there was no fourth wall.
During that first year—David’s year—he showed up one day at my dressing room. He had brought an original hangdog expression to his character and was just damn funny. He was also the first one of us to shoot a commercial, be on The Tonight Show, buy a house, get his own movie. He was the hot guy that first year, and rightly so. He had been hilarious.
That day in my dressing room, he sat down opposite me and started in.
“Matty,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. When we renegotiate our contracts, we should do it as a team. We should all get paid the same amount.” He was by far the one in the best position to negotiate. I could not believe what he was saying. Needless to say, I was thrilled. I was perfectly happy to take advantage of his generosity of spirit.
It was a decision that proved to be extremely lucrative down the line. David had certainly been in a position to go for the most money, and he didn’t. I would like to think that I would have made the same move, but as a greedy twenty-five-year-old, I’m not sure I would have. But his decision served to make us take care of each other through what turned out to be a myriad of stressful network negotiations, and it gave us a tremendous amount of power. By season eight, we were making a million dollars per episode; by season ten we were making even more. We were making $1,100,040 an episode, and we were asking to do fewer episodes. Morons, all of us. We had David’s goodness, and his astute business sense, to thank for what we had been offered. I owe you about $30 million, David. (We were still morons.)
Being on Friends was one of those unicorn situations where the news just kept getting better and better. But off-screen, things weren’t going so well. In late April 1996, I went on Jay Leno and admitted I was single. Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me—why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.
I decided to party in Cape Cod with the Murray brothers. I have no idea why I chose Cape Cod, or why the Murray brothers came with me. I imagined it was just a new place to barhop. It was there that I noticed that something had changed, though—a new dynamic was at play. Girls were coming up and talking to me; the days of nervously approaching women with mediocre lines were over. I just stood in a corner, a vodka tonic in hand, and they came to me.
None of them were Julia Roberts, though.
I’ve detoxed over sixty-five times in my life—but the first was when I was twenty-six.
My Vicodin habit had now kicked in badly. If you watch season three of Friends, I hope you’ll be horrified at how thin I am by the end of the season (opioids fuck with your appetite, plus they make you vomit constantly). In the final episode, you’ll see that I’m wearing a white shirt, and tan slacks, and both look at least three sizes too big for me. (Compare this to the difference in how I look between the final episode of season six and the first of season seven—the Chandler-Monica proposal episodes. I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven [it’s supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season. My weight varied between 128 pounds and 225 pounds during the years of Friends.)
You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season—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.
By the end of season three, I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get fifty-five Vicodin a day—I had to have fifty-five every day, otherwise I’d get so sick. It was a full-time job: making calls, seeing doctors, faking migraines, finding crooked nurses who would give me what I needed.
It had taken me a while to realize what was happening. At the start, I’d been taking something like twelve a day, and then went cold turkey one day, and felt absolutely terrible. Something’s really wrong with me, I thought, but I kept going and kept going. I’ll finish the season of Friends and then I’ll get treatment for this.
I almost killed myself by that decision. Had the season lasted another month, I would no longer be here.
I was never high while I was working. I loved those people—I wanted to always step up for them, and I was the second baseman for the New York Yankees. But addiction wakes up before you do, and it wants you alone. Alcoholism will win every time. As soon as you raise your hand and say, “I’m having a problem,” alcohol sneers, You’re gonna say something about it? Fine, I’ll go away for a while. But I’ll be back.
It never goes away for good.
I had quickly booked another movie, Almost Heroes, a comedy starring Chris Farley and directed by Christopher Guest. They paid me $2 million for that. We shot it in the shitty part of Northern California, up near Eureka. Farley was just as funny as you’d imagine, though his addictions, plus mine, meant that we barely were able to even finish the fucking thing. I was shooting Friends and Almost Heroes at the same time, and I was tired. The pills were not doing what they used to do. I had to take a certain number just to not feel sick all the time.
Eating got in the way of the high, too, so I never ate. Plus, I was always so sick I didn’t want to eat. I was constantly vomiting. This was fine in private, but not great when you are in the middle of the woods talking to Christopher Guest. You are going to throw up in thirty seconds. Better figure out a way to excuse yourself and fast. I vomited behind trees, behind rocks, in ladies’ rooms. I had heard tell of people looking through their own vomit for chunks of pills that they could take again, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I already had so many doctors on the payroll I was rarely in that kind of need anyway. But I did have two towels next to my toilet—one to wipe away the vomit and one to wipe away the tears. I was dying, but I couldn’t tell anyone about it.
Then, Chris Farley died. His disease had progressed faster than mine had. (Plus, I had a healthy fear of the word “heroin,” a fear we did not share.) I punched a hole through Jennifer Aniston’s dressing room wall when I found out. Keanu Reeves walks among us. I had to promote Almost Heroes two weeks after he died; I found myself publicly discussing his death from drugs and alcohol.
I was high the entire time.
No one knew—not my family, my friends, no one. I was impossibly sick all the time. I would try to quit every now and then—three days here, four days there—but it just made me so sad and sick that it was impossible to sustain.
I was home one night, trying to make sense of all of it, when a call came in from an ex-girlfriend.
“I know there is something wrong with you,” she said. “And I am taking you to a doctor.”
I crumbled. I told her everything. I had never cried that much in my life. The secret was out. Someone else knew.
I saw a doctor the next day. He told me to go to Hazelden.
“They have a big lake, there,” the doctor said, and I figured, It’s Minnesota—close enough to Canada. At least I’ll feel at home in the shitty weather.
But I was scared out of my mind. This was real, now. I was on my way to rehab. I was twenty-six years old.
I went to Hazelden to kick pills and managed to learn precisely nothing.
The plan was that before I trekked up to Minnesota I’d go through a rapid detox. In a rapid detox they put you out for two or three days and fill you with antagonists for opiates. By the end of it, you’re supposed to be sober. (By the way, I know now that it doesn’t work, even though it’s still used as a treatment.)
So, I did the rapid detox and then went up to Hazelden, but once I arrived, I felt like death. What they say about opioid detoxes is they can’t kill you, but they can make you wish that you were dead. (The detoxes that can kill you are alcohol and benzos.) I was in my room at Hazelden and I was incredibly sick—I kicked like a fucking dog. Legs, arms, jerking and herking in sheer terror. I was continually begging for some relief, only to be told “you’re detoxed, just relax.”
But I was not detoxed—I’d merely gone from fifty-five Vicodin a day to zero Vicodin a day, basically cold turkey. I became what was called a “wall hugger”—to even move a few steps I had to grab onto the nearest wall.
I know now that if I hadn’t done the rapid detox, I would have been given something to ease the agony, but they thought I’d detoxed, so they let me be. Going from fifty-five to nothing shows I was at least a fucking strong person I suppose, but it was the purest form of hell.
About ten days into my stay, I was in a group session when everything got a little fuzzy. I’m told I kept saying “I’m fine, totally fine,” but I was not fine. My childhood training—that I could never be a bad boy—was so strong I guess that even while having a grand mal seizure I had to make sure I didn’t rock the boat.
When I woke up from the seizure, I was back in my room, and all the staff had gathered, terrified. Not knowing what had happened, and clearly still deeply confused, I said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you guys came to California to see me. That’s so nice!”
“You’re not in California,” someone said, “you’re in Minnesota. You had a grand mal seizure.”
I stayed for another two weeks, and by the end of it, I felt like I ran the place, I was the king of the place. And the way I managed that was simply to imitate Michael Keaton in Clean and Sober.
I was young enough that I put some weight on, played a bunch of tennis, and stopped taking pills. But inside I knew I was going to drink again. Once I felt better, I headed back to California—I wasn’t back to normal, but I felt fine. But as I said, I had learned precisely nothing about what was wrong with me. I hadn’t learned about AA, or how to live a sober life; I’d just gotten off the Vicodin. For those of you watching, this was the beginning of season four—the best I ever looked on the show. Still not good enough for Jennifer Aniston, but pretty fucking good.
Back in Cali, I lasted sixty-eight days and then I had my first drink, my theory being that drinking wasn’t the thing that had almost killed me. It was opiates that almost killed me; vodka had only ever filled the holes, and as the holes were still there, something had to fill them.
I drank every night until 2001.
The run-up to Hazelden had been probably the best year of my life, the best year anyone could ever wish for. The joys of fame had not quite worn off, though if I’d died then, my headstone would have read either: HERE LIES MATTHEW PERRY—HE BROKE UP WITH JULIA ROBERTS or, COULD I BE MORE STUPID AND DEAD?
In 1999, I fell hard for a woman I was working with on a movie. (I was starting to have a track record of falling for women who were famous, just as my mother had been in Canada.) All the walls dropped, and I was just myself … and then she picked somebody else to be in love with.
I’ve been able to get most people I’ve wanted, but this one still hurts. Which just shows that the exception proves the rule: when I can get someone, I have to leave them before they leave me, because I’m not enough and I’m about to be found out, but when someone I want doesn’t choose me, that just proves I’m not enough and I’ve been found out. Heads they win, tails I lose. Either way, to this day if someone mentions her name, my stomach clenches. The fear that drives my every waking minute had come true. She had even mentioned that my drinking was a problem—just another thing that addiction has cost me. You would think that might knock somebody sober, but it actually made it worse. I lit candles all over my house, drank, watched the movie we were in together, torturing myself, alone, heartsick, trying to get over it. Failing.
I was bloated and looked awful, and it was dangerous.
I remember realizing when I was in ninth grade in Ottawa that Michael J. Fox had both the number one movie and the number one TV show at the same time, and even then, at the age of fourteen, steam came out of my ears with envy. Later, I told The New York Times, “You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant.” Fast-forward to the hiatus between seasons five and six of Friends and I found myself filming The Whole Nine Yards, and sure enough, when it came out in early 2000, I had the number one TV show and the number one movie.
Me? I was taking so many pills that I couldn’t leave my bedroom. So, in a moment when you’d think Matthew Perry would be celebrating and being the toast of the town, I was just handling drug dealers and living in dark rooms and misery.
In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better. This is what my costars on Friends did for me. There were times on set when I was extremely hungover, and Jen and Courteney, being devoted to cardio as a cure-all, had a Lifecycle exercise bike installed backstage. In between rehearsals and takes, I’d head back there and ride that thing like the fires of hell were chasing me—anything to get my brain power back to normal. I was the injured penguin, but I was determined to not let these wonderful people, and this show, down.
But still, the addiction ravaged me—one time, in a scene in the coffeehouse when I’m dressed in a suit, I fell asleep right there on the couch, and disaster was averted only when Matt LeBlanc nudged me awake right before my line; no one noticed, but I knew how close I’d come.
But I always showed up, and always had the lines.
And then I got pancreatitis. I was thirty years old.
It was during hiatus. I was alone, again, there was nothing going on—no movie to shoot, nothing, just slow, tar-like time, slipping down the LA canyons toward the endless sea. I was just sitting at home for months drinking—alone so I could drink; drinking, therefore alone. (As I said, alcoholism is desperate to get you on your own.) I was watching the movie Meet Joe Black on repeat, even though it’s about the character Death (me), trying to figure out what love is. Perfect. But it was as if I were Joe Black myself, repeatedly being asked, “What do we do now?” I was like death—I’d drink, watch the movie, pass out, wake up, drink, watch that movie, pass out.
Then, out of nowhere, I felt a knife slide into my stomach, just like that. It pierced the membrane, twisted a little, its serrated edge catching on the veins, heating my blood to boiling and beyond. As that knife got deeper and deeper, I heard myself screaming in pain, an animal being ripped to shreds up in the canyons.
I called my sort-of girlfriend at the time, the wonderful Jamie Tarses, and managed to say, “There’s something wrong.”
Jamie was an angel from God—she drove straight over to my house, poured me into a car, and drove me to the nearest hospital.
In the ER I was screaming, “You gotta pump my stomach! You gotta pump my stomach!”
The doctor just stared at me.
“I don’t need to pump your stomach. It’s not food poisoning.”
“Then what the fuck is it?” I wailed.
“You have pancreatitis,” he said. “Which is something you can only get from drinking too much.”
There are a few causes of pancreatitis, actually—you can have an autoimmune disease, or an infection, or gallstones, but mostly you get it from drinking a fuck-ton of alcohol. Pancreatitis at the age of thirty was unheard of. Yay for me! Another record.
“Fuck that,” I said, “no. I don’t drink too much.…” It could have been shame; it could have been denial. I think they’re hard to tell apart. Whatever it was, I made Jamie drive me home.
After about an hour at my house, I knew something was still seriously wrong, so this time we went to a different hospital, but got the same answer.
For thirty days and nights I was in the hospital, fed fluids through an IV (the only way to treat pancreatitis was to leave the pancreas completely alone, which meant I could not eat or drink anything for about thirty days); and for every one of those nights, I’d fall asleep with Jamie Tarses by my side—she had a bed moved in, the whole bit—so I’d wake up to find her there, too. (I still believe Jamie was a messenger from a benevolent God, and that none of us were worthy of her—I know I wasn’t.) We’d watch The West Wing over and over while I smoked—yes, I smoked in my hospital room. It was a different time, or I was so fucking famous at the time that it didn’t matter. At one point they caught me and told me to stop. But I was desperate, so I checked myself out of the hospital, had a cigarette, and then checked myself back in.
It took seven hours to go through intake again. It was worth it.
To ease the pain they hooked me up to a machine that administered regular amounts of a drug called Dilaudid. It is an opioid that changes the brain’s relationship to pain—if only it came in human form. But I loved Dilaudid—it was my new favorite drug, and I would have stayed in that hospital for a hundred days if they kept administrating it. For those thirty days I had Jamie at my side, and I was high and happy. Especially happy when I signed the deal for seasons six and seven, the deal that, owing to David Schwimmer’s selfless and brilliant idea, brought us $50 million. I signed that contract with a feeding tube in my arm and Dilaudid flowing through my brain.
But they were onto me—clearly, I was asking for too much of the wonder drug.
“You’re fine,” one doctor said. “Your pancreatitis is over. You have to go home. Tomorrow.”
“You mean you’re not going to give me Dilaudid tonight?”
“No,” he said, “we are not.”
Somehow, I got through the night, but nobody knew what to do with me.
Enter, stage left, my father. Bless him, he offered to have me live with him and his family in Ojai, a town northwest of LA.
“Come live with us,” he said, “go to some AA meetings. Get yourself straight.”
It was an OK option, and with nothing else to do, I headed back to my home on Chelan Way in the Hollywood Hills to pick up some things. I was sober, but I had just been on Dilaudid for thirty days, so I was still a little out of it. Jamie waited while I packed a bag, then I followed her in my green Porsche out along the winding roads in the Hills. As I made my first left onto Chelan Drive there was a courier van right in the middle of the road coming toward me, so I swerved and pumped the brakes, but the car hit some grass and just kept going and I drove into the stairs leading up to a house, demolishing them, and then on into the living room. Fortunately, no one was home, but the car was a wreck, and so were the stairs.
Fucking stairwells once again.
I did the right thing and waited for the cops to arrive. I kept glancing up at the sky, wondering when the next cartoon anvil was going to fall on my head. I was there long enough for someone to take a picture and sell it to People magazine—my car in a house, me on the way to staying with my father in Ojai.
It was like I was fifteen again, living with my dad in California. A car would come to pick me up every day to take me to film Friends. But it wasn’t too long until I picked up Vicodin again, and then started fucking drinking again, and liking it again. To quote my therapist, “Reality is an acquired taste,” and I had failed to acquire it. I was sneaking both drugs and alcohol into my dad’s house, and his wife was so angry that eventually my father very calmly approached me and told me that I had to leave.
Oh, I’ll leave, but neither of you will ever see a dime of my money, ever, I thought, but I did not say.
I returned for the next season of Friends high as a kite, and everyone knew that something had to be done.
I had already heard about methadone, a drug that promised to remove a fifty-five-a-day Vicodin habit in one day with one little sip. The only catch was, you had to drink that little sip every day, or you would go into serious withdrawal. Sounds good to me, my desperate mind thought. I got on the drug immediately and was able to return to Friends the next day, sharp as a tack.
I had been told that methadone had no side effects. This was not true. In fact, it was the beginning of the end.
Otherwise, everything else was going great. Friends was still as successful as ever. And then another cast member came to my trailer. It wasn’t David this time, and it wasn’t good news.
“I know you’re drinking,” she said.
I had long since gotten over her—ever since she started dating Brad Pitt, I was fine—and had worked out exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward, but still, to be confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating. And I was confused.
“How can you tell?” I said. I never worked drunk. “I’ve been trying to hide it.…”
“We can smell it,” she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural “we” hit me like a sledgehammer.
“I know I’m drinking too much,” I said, “but I don’t exactly know what to do about it.”
Sometimes I wasn’t OK to drive to set (I never worked high, but I certainly worked hungover) and I’d take a limo—that will get you some dubious looks from people, let me tell you. Everyone would ask me if I was all right, but nobody wanted to stop the Friends train because it was such a moneymaker, and I just felt horrible about it. My greatest joy was also my biggest nightmare—I was this close to messing up this wonderful thing.
Eventually I got a sober companion at work with me, but it wasn’t really helping. One day I had taken some kind of medication and had drunk the night before, and it all kicked in during a run-through in front of everyone. But there was a curious twist to this one: I was hammered but didn’t know it, so I thought there was nothing to hide. I didn’t know that I was wasted, but I was slurring. Folks couldn’t understand a word that came out of my mouth. But I had no idea.
Once again, I went back to my dressing room and everybody from the show was there.
“What are you going to do, Matty?” they said.
“It’s medication, I’ll fix it. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t drink that night and the next day I showed up to work, but I was on thin ice.
I called my manager.
“Yeah,” he said, “they’re onto you.”
The writers, the cast—fuck, everybody—knew, so I said, “You gotta get me a movie. Right now. Get me out of here.”
Once again, my idea was to pull a geographic. I still thought if I removed myself from the situation I was in, I would be able to quit all the drugs and drinking and come out fighting. (All I was actually doing was tripling my workload while the drinking and drugs continued to escalate.) Because wherever you go, there you are. This also reminded me of the time I’d begged for a pilot and had gotten L.A.X. 2194. Back then I’d had enough juice to get a pilot and thereby enough money to drink at the Formosa; now, as the new century dawned, I had enough juice to be able to score a movie if I wanted it. Serving Sara would be filmed in Dallas, and I have no idea why I thought that would be the perfect place to get sober.…
Serving Sara was a bad movie, but it was made much worse by how bad I was in it.
I was in terrible shape, and I was overextended. I was working four days a week on the movie and then flying on a private jet back to Los Angeles to do Friends. On the plane I’d have a water bottle filled with vodka that I’d sip from continually as I read over my lines. (In fact, if you’re keeping score at home, I was actually on methadone, Xanax, cocaine, and a full quart of vodka a day.) One day in Dallas I showed up to do a scene only to realize that we’d filmed it a few days earlier. Things were unraveling.
Jamie Tarses—beautiful, amazing, caring, genius Jamie Tarses—flew out to Texas and was basically my nurse, but I was still drinking and taking all the drugs and trying to hide it from her. One night we were watching TV and she turned to me, and she said, “It looks like you’re disappearing.”
A window opened—the slightest crack, but open.
“I don’t want to disappear,” I whispered. “Stop everything.”
I called my manager, I called my father, I called everybody.
“I’m completely fucked-up,” I said. “I need help. I need to go to rehab.”
Serving Sara shut down, something that later cost me $650,000. Small price to save my life. Friends postponed my scenes. And off I went to a detox center in Marina del Rey this time, on the west side of LA. I was a car going two hundred miles an hour that just hit a brick wall; a green Porsche hitting a stairwell. (Fucking fucking stairwells.)
The first day they said, “Go to your room; you’re not taking any more drugs,” but they may have well said:
“Go to your room and just don’t breathe anymore.”
“But I have to breathe to live.”
“No. People have done it before. People have gone in there and stopped breathing.”
That’s exactly what it felt like.
I spent one month there. One night during my stay, I was smoking a cigarette and it was raining and there was a light bulb swinging in the smoking section. And I said out loud, “This is what hell is. I’m in hell.”
It was in del Rey when I finally picked up the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. About thirty pages in I read: “These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.”
I closed the book and began to weep. I’m weeping now just thinking about it. I was not alone. There was an entire group of people who thought the way I did. (And William Silkworth had written this line on July 27, 1938.) It was an amazing moment and a terrible moment all at the same time. What this line meant was that I was never going to be alone again. It also meant that I was an alcoholic and would have to stop drinking and drugging right now, and every day, one day at a time, for the rest of my life.
The folks at Marina del Rey said, “This guy is hard-core. Thirty days is not going to do it for him. He needs long-term treatment.” So, from there they sent me to a Malibu rehab, where I spent the first twelve days not sleeping at all. My liver enzymes were off the charts high. But after about three months I started to get better—I took part in the groups and “did the work,” as they say.
I was living in rehab when Monica and Chandler got married. It was May 17, 2001.
Two months earlier, on March 25, 2001, I’d been detoxing one night when the powers that be decided to give us all the night off to watch the Academy Awards. I was lying there, sweating and twitching, filled with fear, barely listening, when Kevin Spacey stepped up to the podium and intoned:
“The nominees for best performance by an actress in a leading role are:
Joan Allen, in The Contender;
Juliette Binoche, in Chocolat;
Ellen Burstyn, in Requiem for a Dream;
Laura Linney, in You Can Count on Me;
and
Julia Roberts, in Erin Brockovich.”
Then he said,
“And the Oscar goes to … Julia Roberts!”
I watched as Julia kissed her boyfriend at the time, the actor Benjamin Bratt, and walked up the steps to receive her award.
“Thank you, thank you, ever so much,” she said. “I’m so happy.…” As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry, pleading, filled with longing and tears, arguing with the universe while God calmly tapped his cane on the hard, cold world.
I made a joke.
“I’ll take you back,” I said. “I’ll take you back.”
The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now. And I was lucky to have them. They were saving my life.
On Julia’s big night in Hollywood, I crawled into bed and stared at the ceiling. There would be no sleep for me that night. Just thoughts racing through my head like someone had fired a bullet into a tin can. That blue truck, that mountaintop. All the blue trucks, all mountaintops, gone, vanished like ether in a vacuum of fear. I was incredibly happy for her. As for me, I was just grateful to have made it one more day. When you are at the bottom, the days are long.
I didn’t need an Oscar, I just needed one more day.