Friends star Matthew Perry has revealed that he can’t watch the hit sitcom anymore, citing how it reminds him of his battles with addiction as the primary reason.
The actor played one of the six titular friends, Chandler Bing, in the show, and in a new interview with CNN, he discussed his well-publicised struggles with addiction that ran concurrently with the show’s success.
“I was taking 55 Vicodin a day, I weighed 128lbs, 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,” he said.
He continued: “I didn’t watch the show, and haven’t watched the show, because I could go, ‘Drinking, opiates, drinking, cocaine’. 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 then said that his addiction struggles are “not fair” when comparing them to his colleagues’ experiences on the show. “You know, the thing that always makes me cry – and I hope I don’t cry here – is that it’s not fair. It’s not, it’s not fair,” he said.
Perry concluded: “It’s not fair that I had to go through this disease while the other five didn’t. They got everything that I got, but I had to fight this thing – and still have to fight this thing.”
Elsewhere, Perry recently found himself at the centre of a social media firestorm after he criticised fellow actor Keanu Reeves in his new book Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
At one point in the memoir, he wrote: “Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us? River was a better actor than me; I was funnier. But I certainly held my own in our scenes — no small feat, when I look back decades later.”
