‘Friends’ star Matthew Perry once said it ‘wouldn’t surprise anybody’ if he died

nypost.com:

Matthew Perry candidly spoke about death just one year before he was found dead at age 54 of an apparent drowning.The beloved “Friends” alum wrote about his decades-long excessive use of alcohol and pills in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” as well as during interviews promoting the book.“I say in the book that if I did die it would shock people, but it wouldn’t surprise anybody.

And that’s what I’m doing with writing this book. That’s why I wanted to do it,” Perry told People ahead of the memoir’s release last November.He continued: “I wanted to talk about the highs and the lows because people are suffering out there and maybe if they hear a story from somebody they’ve seen on TV that’s worse than their’s or just the same of their’s, they’ll be filed with hope, which is the key thing.”In a separate interview with The New York Times, the actor said he had been sober for 18 months and had “probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober” after his struggles with alcohol and opioids.

At one point, he said he was taking 55 Vicodin pills daily and going to open hours to steal from strangers’ medicine cabinets.Perry was even “driven back to the treatment center …in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician” right after filming the “Friends” Season 7 finale, where Chandler Bing and Monica Gellar (Courteney Cox) get married.“[I was] at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show,” he told the New York Times. “When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math.

I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie.