Matthew Perry‘s memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing forced Friends fans to view the show’s golden years from a different perspective.
Released almost a year before Perry’s death at age 54, the book provided an unflinching account of the actor’s time before he was on the hit ’90s sitcom and beyond, delving deep into his battle with addiction and the cost of fame.
There were, however, some more light-hearted anecdotes to balance the harrowing tales.
Here are 10 of the biggest bombshells from the book.
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Matthew Perry allegedly ‘beat up’ a young Justin Trudeau
Nuclear diplomacy, indeed.
According to Perry, when he was nine months old, his father abandoned him, his mother and his siblings to attempt to become an actor in California.
”What the f–k is an actor? And where the f–k is my dad?” Perry writes.
Afterwards, his mother began working as a press aide for then-prime minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau, remarries and moves briefly to Toronto. At this stage, Perry, then 10, starts acting up in the form of smoking and getting bad grades.
He also claims to have beaten up a young Justin Trudeau, Pierre’s son and now Canadian prime minister, and on that, Perry says: ”I decided to end my argument with him when he was put in charge of an entire army.”
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Matthew Perry found peace for the first time when he drank as a teen
When Perry was 14, he was a nationally-ranked tennis player in Canada. He also liked drinking.
In his memoir, Perry recalled his first drink – a bottle of Andrès Baby Duck. One night, as he sipped on the “sweet, purple, sparkling wine”, his friends began throwing up. Perry, however, said he found a sense of peace.
“I was lying back in the grass and the mud, looking at the moon, surrounded by fresh puke, and … nothing bothered me,” he writes.
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Matthew Perry started acting to reconnect with his father
By 15, Perry says he was a “broken human being”, and it was at this age he moved from Canada to Hollywood in the hopes of reconnecting with his father – a move that causes a great rift between Perry and his mother.
Moving from tennis to acting was, in part for Perry, due to the extreme Californian heat. He recalls acting as his passion, saying even when he was at his lowest points, he was thrilled to be the lead in the school play or acting out as the class clown.
”Why wouldn’t I want to pretend to be another person?” he writes.
In Hollywood with his father, who had alcoholism, Perry also began grappling with the disease, drinking six vodka tonics every night, a ritual he declares as the “best part of [his] day”. Unlike his father, however, Perry was not a high-functioning alcoholic.
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Is there beef between Matthew Perry and Keanu Reeves?
Californian women loved 15-year-old Perry’s Canadian accent, his sarcastic humour and his iconic double-takes – and one day, film director William Richert spots Perry “charming a bunch of young women” in a diner and asks him to be in his next movie.
Before he knows it, Perry is starring in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon alongside the late River Phoenix. The duo become fast friends, and seven years after they met, Phoenix dies at the age of 23 after collapsing at the West Hollywood nightclub The Viper Room.
“It always seems to be the really talented guys who go down,” Perry reflects in his book. “Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us?”
Reeves, for his part, was reportedly “taken aback” at being called out in the book. Perry has since apologised for seemingly smearing the Nicest Guy in Hollywood‘s name, saying he simply chose a name at random.
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Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston
Perry’s former co-star Jennifer Aniston features heavily in his memoir, revealing Aniston once confronted him about his secret drinking in his trailer on the Friends set.
But Perry also reveals in his memoir that he had a crush on Aniston, and actually asked her out three years before Friends first aired in 1994 – an overture she rebuffed.
He says that his romantic interest in Aniston, however, disappeared in ”the hot glow of the show … and her deafening lack of interest”.
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Matthew Perry and Tricia Fisher
You might know of the late Carrie Fisher – but she also has a half-sister named Tricia, and when Perry was 18, he started dating her.
“The rhyming poetry of her name alone should have made her irresistible,” Perry writes of his former girlfriend. He was, however, at the time, hiding what he called “a great ugly secret” from her – drinking-related erectile dysfunction.
Perry, however, did manage to get an erection for long enough to lose his virginity, which he credits was due to Fisher being charming. For her efforts, how did Perry repay her?
“Why, good reader … by sleeping with almost every woman in southern California,” he writes.
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Matthew Perry and Valerie Bertinelli
Perry claims in his memoir that, although actress Valerie Bertinelli was married to Eddie Van Halen
In fact, Van Halen, according to Perry, was “passed out” drunk only a few metres away from Perry and Bertinelli, who reportedly enjoyed a steamy makeout session.
Perry says he was “completely captivated” by Bertinelli when they filmed the sitcom Sydney, where he played her brother.
“I fell madly in love with Valerie Bertinelli, who was clearly in a troubled marriage,” he writes. “My crush was crushing; not only was she way out of my league, but she was also married to one of the most famous rock stars on the planet, Eddie Van Halen.”
Perry said at first the feelings were not mutual, but he didn’t care.
”It is important to point out here that my feelings for Valerie were real. I was completely captivated – I mean, I was obsessed with her and harboured elaborate fantasies about her leaving Eddie Van Halen and living out the rest of her days with me,” he writes.
So, Perry took “[his] chance” when he and Bertinelli were at she and Van Halen’s house, when Van Halen was passed out in a drunken stupor.
“If you think I didn’t actually have a chance in hell you’d be wrong, dear reader – Valerie and I had a long, elaborate make-out session. It was happening – maybe she felt the same way I did,” he writes. “I told her I had thought about doing that for a long time, and she had said it right back to me.”
The next day, however, Bertinelli “made no mention of what had happened” to Perry’s devastation. Bertinelli has since responded to Perry’s claims.
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Matthew Perry and Julia Roberts
As Friends soared to international success, Julia Roberts agreed to appear on the show – but only if she appeared in Perry’s storyline.
“But how to woo her?” Perry writes, but the answer ultimately did come to him in the form of three dozen red roses sent to her, alongside a note.
“The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,” he recalls writing on the note.
Roberts surprisingly responds with a challenge for Perry to explain quantum physics to her, and Perry says he wrote her a “paper about wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle and entanglement”.
She, in turn, then sent him “lots and lots of bagels”. The duo then progress to sending each other faxes daily, with Perry writing that he would often leave a party early to race home and read each “captivating” fax from Roberts four or five times.
Roberts and Perry then spent three months sending missives back and forth, with Roberts faces “[veering] romantic”. They then date for two months – and Perry has also revealed why he broke up with her, something he says would have left her confused.
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Matthew Perry’s Vicodin addiction started with a jet ski accident
Perry, while shooting Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek, had a jet ski accident, and as a result, was given Vicodin for the pain.
He says he took it while driving home to Las Vegas, writing: ”I shook hands with God that morning.”
Perry survived the drive in his red Mustang convertible, and decides to get 40 more pills delivered to his house. Eighteen months later, he’s taking 55 Vicodin pills a day, and describes securing them as a “full-time job”.
At this stage, he’s shooting season three of Friends plus the film Almost Heroes, and Perry says he’s not eating, and he’s drinking and vomiting ”constantly – behind trees, behind rocks, in ladies’ rooms”.
“No one knew – not my family, my friends, no one. I was impossibly sick all the time,” he writes.
Perry goes to rehab when he’s 26, which kicks his Vicodin addiction. Though his addiction to drinking persists until 2001.
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Matthew Perry almost died after his colon burst from opioid abuse
By the time he’s 30, Perry is still drinking, and has started on methadone, on top of cocaine and Xanax.
He says that when Friends taped its final episode in 2004, he felt nothing, writing, “I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opioid I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside.”
Perry ultimately hit rock bottom and had a religious experience in his kitchen, which spurred him to go without alcohol for periods of up to two years.
In 2019, at the age of 49, Perry nearly died after his colon burst from opioid overuse. He was in a coma for two weeks and spent five months in the hospital.
“The doctors told my family that I had a two percent chance to live,” Perry writes. “I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”
Perry quit OxyContin after he had to use a colostomy bag for nine months, but his smoking habit is harder to kick. Despite quitting for 15 days, one day, when he bit into a piece of toast with peanut butter, his front teeth fell out – the pain of which sent him back to cigarettes.
In January 2022, Perry had his 14th surgery to do with opiate abuse. He says he believes he’s not slept more than four hours a night in his whole life, and is full of regret about his past relationships.
”This is the life of someone who’s been blessed with the big terrible thing,” Perry wrote in his book.
Ultimately, Perry said he was “most surprised” about his “resilience”.
”The way that I can bounce back from all of this torture and awfulness,” he said.
“Wanting to tell the story, even though it’s a little scary to tell all your secrets in a book, I didn’t leave anything out. Everything’s in there.”
If you or someone you know would like to talk to someone confidentially about addiction, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit Reach Out. In an emergency, call 000.