Matthew Perry ‘Can’t Watch’ Friends and See His Addiction’s Physical Toll
glamour.comFriends since it went off the air in 2004 is one of the eponymous pals himself. Matthew Perry, who opened up about his drug and alcohol addiction in his recently released memoir, , says he “can’t watch the show back” because all he sees are the physical signs of his disease. “I was taking 55 Vicodin a day, I weighed 128 pounds, I was on Friends getting watched by 30 million people—and that’s why I can’t watch the show, ’cause I was brutally thin,” Perry said in a recent interview. “I didn’t watch the show, and haven’t watched the show, because I could go, ‘Drinking, opiates, drinking, cocaine,’” he said. “I could tell season by season, by how I looked.
That’s why I don’t wanna watch it, because that’s what I see.”Perry maintained that while he was “never wasted while working,” he would go to set “extremely hungover” to the point of shaking. “But Chandler never changed, the writing never changed,” he continued. “It was my ability to pull off this addiction that I didn’t understand.”The actor, who has over the years, even had his 2002 film Serving Sara with Elizabeth Hurley temporarily halted so that he could receive treatment.
Perry also wrote in his memoir that viewers can tell which phase of addiction he’s in based on his physical appearance. “When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol,” he said. “When I’m skinny, it’s pills.”In a recent sit-down Perry was played clips from his NBC sitcom.
In one, he appears noticeably thin. “That’s very hard to watch,” Perry said of watching the scene. “Because in this weird way I feel sorry for that guy.
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