Matthew Perry almost missed taking part in ‘Friends’ reunion show

30 October 2022

Matthew Perry almost missed participating in the ‘Friends’ reunion show.

Matthew Perry almost missed participating in the ‘Friends’ reunion show

The 53-year-old actor said he nearly couldn’t take part in the 2021 special featuring the cast of the sitcom as he had undergone emergency dental surgery a few days before taping that left his mouth feeling “like fire”.

His top teeth had fallen out after he bit into a piece of peanut butter toast and he said he carried them in a bag to a dentist to have the operation.

Matthew, who played Chandler Bing for all 10 seasons of ‘Friends’ from 1994 to 2004, made the admission in an interview with Diane Sawyer, saying it left his voice sounding “off” on the reunion show.

He added: “I couldn’t not show up. So, what I chose to do was just go and do the best that I could… it sounded like my voice was off.”

The chat with Diane, 76, was part of his ongoing promotion of his upcoming memoir ‘Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing’, in which he details his decades battling drug and drink addictions.

He said about wanting to use his experience to help others due to his celebrity status: “For some reason, it’s obviously because I was on ‘Friends’, more people will listen to me, so I’ve got to take advantage of that – I’ve got to help as many people as I can.”

Matthew also admitted to Diane the “weirdest” thing he did to feed his addictions was going to open houses so he could steal pills from medicine cabinets.

He said: “On Sundays, I would go to open houses and go to the bathrooms in the open house and see what pills they had in there and steal them. And I think they thought, ‘Well, there’s no way that Chandler came in and stole from us.’”

Matthew has said he was on 55 pain killers a day and dropped down to only 128lbs in weight in the depths of his pills addiction.

He also tells in his autobiography he woke up “50 to 60” times covered in his faeces while using a colostomy bag fitted after surgery to treat his exploded colon, which burst due to his drug and drink use.