Matthew Perry's SHOCKING "Friends" Confession: High On Every Episode?! 💔

Stateside Gossip

Dive into the heartbreaking and shocking confession from the late Matthew Perry, star of the iconic show "Friends." In this video, we explore his candid admission about being high during every episode of "Friends," a revelation that has stunned fans and the Friends cast alike. Uncover the untold Friends secrets and the profound personal struggles Matthew Perry faced behind the scenes as Chandler Bing.Stateside Gossip brings you the deepest insights into Hollywood drama, celebrity confessions, and the Matthew Perry addiction journey. This is a crucial piece of entertainment news, shedding light on Matthew Perry's legacy and the real-life challenges faced by Hollywood's beloved stars. Join us for this poignant celebrity gossip and a look into the US celeb culture's most impactful stories.

Transcript

00:00Let's begin today by trying to, you know, wrap our heads around the central paradox of Matthew Perry.

00:05Right.

00:06Because you have Chandler Bing, this character who was, I mean, he was the heart of the show for so many people.

00:12A comedic anchor, absolutely.

00:13And yet, what the sources were looking at today's show is just this staggering truth.

00:19That he was high, basically, through all of it.

00:22It's the functional capacity that's so hard to grasp.

00:24I mean, the reports we have, especially for season three, the numbers are just, they're enormous.

00:30How bad was it?

00:30He was taking up to 55 Vicodin pills.

00:34Daily.

00:3455?

00:35And if you look at his physical state then, he was only, what, 128 pounds?

00:39Yeah.

00:40That kind of chemical load on a body that small, it shouldn't be compatible with performance.

00:45Let alone the kind of comedic timing Friends demanded.

00:47Exactly.

00:48And the sources have this one detail that just, it crystallizes everything for me.

00:53This story about his teeth.

00:54Oh, yeah.

00:55That one's rough.

00:56He's eating toast one morning, and his teeth literally fall out.

00:59And what does he do?

01:00He gets them fixed and goes straight to set.

01:02He never missed a day.

01:03You know, that sounds like commitment, but it's really, it's a profound survival mechanism.

01:08And I was so.

01:09He knew the show, and the approval that came with it was his lifeline.

01:13Even while the drugs were, you know, destroying him from the inside out.

01:16So that's our mission today, really, to unpack these sources and understand how he got there,

01:21starting with that childhood feeling of being an unaccompanied minor.

01:25And tracing the catastrophic physical toll it all took, right into the end.

01:29But before we get to the origins, we have to talk about that one moment, the one that

01:34finally broke through his defenses.

01:36Intervention.

01:36Yes.

01:37After years of him hiding it, and he was an expert at hiding it, the cast finally confronted

01:43him.

01:44It was Jennifer Aniston.

01:46It was.

01:46And the detail from the sources that's so important is that it wasn't the words themselves,

01:51we can smell the alcohol on you.

01:53What was it then?

01:54It was the pronoun.

01:55We.

01:56It told him the secret was out.

01:58That this family he'd chosen, they all knew.

02:00And that, apparently, is what shattered him.

02:03So to understand why that shield was so important, we have to go all the way back.

02:07Back to 1969.

02:09He was born, Matthew Lankford Perry, and almost immediately, his life is defined by distance.

02:15His parents separate in 1970.

02:19He wasn't even one year old.

02:21And his mother, Suzanne Morrison, she had a pretty high-pressure job, right?

02:24I mean, that's an understatement.

02:25She was the press secretary for Pierre Trudeau.

02:27The prime minister of Canada.

02:29Exactly.

02:29So Matthew spends his childhood being shuttled between Ottawa and L.A., between these two

02:35really intense, high-profile worlds.

02:38Which is where that phrase comes from.

02:39The sources say he flew alone between those two cities constantly, the unaccompanied minor.

02:45It's not just a travel stat.

02:46It's this whole psychological framework, you know?

02:48It teaches you that you're on your own.

02:50And that feeling must have just gotten more intense as the families grew.

02:53Oh, absolutely.

02:54His mom remarries, his dad remarries, and suddenly he has five half-siblings.

02:58Wow.

02:59In how long?

03:00Just eight years.

03:01He went from being the center of two worlds to, in his words, feeling like a guest in

03:06their lives.

03:07So what did that do?

03:08How did that feeling of being an outsider manifest?

03:11Anger.

03:13And looking for attention elsewhere.

03:16The sources talk about him stealing money for cigarettes when he was 10.

03:18And it got physical, too.

03:20It did.

03:20He was getting into fights at school, just looking for any kind of outlet.

03:24Which brings us to that famous story, the one about the classmate he bullied.

03:30Right.

03:30Out of jealousy over sports, he and a friend beat up a kid named Justin Trudeau.

03:35The future prime minister of Canada.

03:38Just a bizarre piece of trivia.

03:40It is.

03:41But what's more important for his story is what he did with that anger.

03:45He channeled it.

03:46Into tennis.

03:47Into tennis.

03:48He became obsessed.

03:49By 13, he's ranked number two in Ottawa.

03:51He's training 10 hours a day.

03:53He found a structure, something to get that approval he was missing.

03:56100%.

03:57Yeah.

03:57But those things, when they're based on what other people think, they can be really fragile.

04:01What happened?

04:02He moved to L.A., thinks he can go pro, he has one really bad loss, sees what he thinks

04:07is disappointment in his family's faces, and he quits.

04:11Just like that.

04:12And the structure is gone.

04:13The structure is gone.

04:14And the noise inside, as he called it, comes roaring back.

04:19That's when the addiction starts.

04:20Immediately.

04:21How old was he?

04:22His first drink was at 14, some Budweiser and cheap wine.

04:27But it wasn't a slow burn.

04:29By 18, he was drinking every single day.

04:33And he knew why he was doing it?

04:34He was crystal clear about it.

04:36He said it was to silence the noise.

04:38He was self-medicating years before anyone knew who Chandler Bing was.

04:42Okay, so let's move to that moment.

04:44Landing Chandler.

04:46Before Friends, he was.

04:47He was struggling.

04:49He really was.

04:49Failed pilots, sitcoms, nobody remembers.

04:52He said he was just desperate.

04:53And that desperation, it turned into conviction, didn't it?

04:56Absolutely.

04:57When the script, which was then called Friends Like Us, came along, he just felt this deep

05:02connection to Chandler.

05:03He said it was him.

05:04That mix of sarcasm and vulnerability.

05:07He was so sure that he was coaching other actors who were auditioning for the part.

05:10And he didn't even need a script for his own audition.

05:12He just walked in and was the character.

05:14He had literally prayed for fame and he got it.

05:17But the dichotomy kicks in almost immediately.

05:20Yeah.

05:21He said the happiness, that feeling of, I made it, it lasted about eight months.

05:26And then?

05:27The addiction was already there.

05:29It never really left.

05:30He had that rule, didn't he?

05:31No drinking on the actual set.

05:33He did, but it didn't stop him from showing up hungover or shaking.

05:37He was in withdrawal during filming sometimes.

05:40It's incredible to think about the support system he did have, though.

05:43The cast.

05:44The financial unity alone is huge.

05:46You have to remember, David Schwimmer insisted they all negotiate together for equal pay.

05:51Which is how they all ended up getting a million dollars an episode.

05:54Right.

05:55Perry joked that he owed Schwimmer about $30 million for that.

05:58So there was this professional solidarity, but the personal isolation just let the addiction grow.

06:03And then came the turning point.

06:051997.

06:06The jet ski accident.

06:07Season three.

06:08He gets a prescription for Heikoden.

06:10And that's the catalyst.

06:11He goes from alcohol to opioids.

06:13He quickly jumps to 20, 30 pills a day, plus a quart of vodka.

06:17That's when he went to rehab for the first time.

06:19This is the era of the 55 pills a day.

06:22It is.

06:23And the lengths he went to hide it are just, they're heartbreaking.

06:28Faking injuries for prescriptions.

06:30And more than that.

06:31The reports say he would go to open houses and steal prescription bottles out of people's medicine cabinets.

06:37His logic being what?

06:38That no one would ever suspect Chandler Bing of being a thief.

06:42The performance was constant.

06:43It was.

06:44But the body can only take so much.

06:47By 2000, he's hospitalized with pancreatitis from the alcohol abuse.

06:51I mean, his digestive enzymes were attacking his own organs.

06:55And this all collides in the most public way possible during the season seven finale.

07:00Chandler and Monica's wedding.

07:01He was in full withdrawal filming those scenes.

07:04Yes.

07:05The sources concern it.

07:06Hands shaking so badly he had to hide them.

07:09Vomiting between takes.

07:10The second the director yelled rap.

07:12He was driven directly from the set.

07:14Still in his wedding tuxedo.

07:15Yeah.

07:16Straight to a rehab facility in Malibu.

07:18We see a wedding.

07:18Behind the scenes, it's a medical emergency.

07:21A profound one.

07:21So we mentioned the cast intervention with Jennifer Aniston.

07:25The sources say it was pretty serious.

07:27They basically threatened to walk.

07:28That tough love.

07:30Risking the biggest show on TV was critical.

07:33And it worked.

07:34For a while.

07:35Season nine.

07:36Season nine was the only full season of Friends that he was completely sober for.

07:40And here's the part that just guts me.

07:42It was the only season he was ever nominated for an Emmy for the show.

07:45I mean, talk about a clear-eyed moment of seeing what the addiction had cost him creatively.

07:49He managed to stay sober through the end of the show.

07:52They even had a mocktail party for him on set to celebrate one year sober.

07:55They did.

07:56But the sources are so clear about the relentless nature of this disease.

08:01The show wraps in May 2004.

08:03The structure that kept him accountable is gone.

08:06And just 72 hours later, he relapsed.

08:09Catastrophically.

08:10He tried heroin that was laced with fentanyl.

08:13And was apparently minutes from death.

08:15It was just the beginning of this brutal cycle that would define the rest of his life.

08:18Culminating in that 2018 health crisis.

08:21Which is maybe the most visceral example of the price he paid.

08:24His colon ruptured from opioid abuse.

08:26The odds they gave him were, what, 2%?

08:30A 2% chance of survival.

08:32He was in a coma for two weeks on an ECMO machine,

08:35which is basically a machine that was breathing and pumping blood for him.

08:39His body had completely shut down.

08:41And he survived, but he had a colostomy bag for nine months.

08:45He showed the scar at the Friends reunion.

08:47Yeah, that moment silenced the room.

08:50It was just this stark visual proof of the battle.

08:53And the stats of that battle.

08:55Yeah.

08:56They're just incomprehensible.

08:57By age 49, he'd spent about $9 million on recovery.

09:0115 stays in rehab.

09:0365 separate detoxes.

09:06Even the procedures to help him were dangerous.

09:08His heart stopped for five minutes during his surgery in Switzerland.

09:11The CPR broke eight of his ribs.

09:13It was just a constant, brutal fight for his life.

09:16And through it all, he was so clear about what he wanted his legacy to be.

09:21Right.

09:21He said he didn't want to be remembered for friends.

09:23He wanted to be remembered for helping people get sober.

09:25And his foundation is carrying that on now.

09:27After his death, his memoir sold millions,

09:30and his team launched the Matthew Perry Foundation.

09:32Which brings us to the end, October 28, 2023.

09:35He was found in his hot tub.

09:37The cause of death was drowning and the acute effects of ketamine.

09:40And the amount of ketamine in his system was.

09:43It was far, far beyond any therapeutic dose.

09:47And that led to an investigation.

09:49It did.

09:50Which resulted in charges against five people in August 2024,

09:54including his assistant and two doctors.

09:56It's just a dark reminder that this fight is so complicated,

10:00even at the very end.

10:01So we've tracked this life, this huge gap between the public figure we all loved,

10:06and just the relentless physical devastation he was dealing with in private.

10:11And if you connect it all back to that unaccompanied minor feeling,

10:14you see the pattern.

10:15He wanted connection, but he was terrified of being exposed.

10:18So he hid.

10:19He stole.

10:20He lied.

10:20He protected the shame of the addiction at all costs,

10:23because I think he feared that vulnerability more than he feared dying.

10:27His life was a heroic fight.

10:29And it's so important to remember, this was a fight he waged with every possible resource,

10:33money, fame, a support system.

10:36Absolutely.

10:36And that leads to the final question, really.

10:39He said he wanted to be remembered for helping people get sober.

10:42But given everything the sources tell us,

10:44the $9 million, the 15 rehabs, the incredible support, and the tragic outcome.

10:50It makes you ask a really tough question.

10:52It does.

10:52It makes you, the listener, really have to consider,

10:54if a person with all those resources couldn't win this fight,

10:58what does that say about the sheer invisible struggle faced by millions of others

11:02battling this disease without any of that wealth or fame?

11:05That's something worth mulling over.

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