Matthew Perry: Friends star’s memoir was an insight into his addiction struggles

They were the Friends moments watched by millions of fans around the world — Chandler proposing to Monica, Ross accidentally saying Rachel’s name at the altar, and the infamous “break” between them.

But star Matthew Perry couldn’t remember any of those scenes.

Asked on a 2016 tour in the UK what his favourite moment from the show was, Perry admitted the lapse of memory.

“I think the answer is, I don’t remember three years of it,” he said. “So none of those … Somewhere between season three and six … I was a little out of it.”

The comments were standard for the typically candid Perry, who spoke honestly and openly about the struggles he faced with drug and alcohol addiction.

In the aftermath of Friends: The Reunion special in 2021, many fans were concerned about the star — who slurred his speech, had a bloated face and he looked sad.

Speculation he had relapsed into his 20-year drug addiction ran rife until clarification came he had emergency dental surgery.

It was following the reunion Perry wrote his memoir: Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, in 2022.

Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow wrote in the book’s foreword she was often asked “How is Matthew Perry doing?”

“I understand why so many people asked it: they love Matthew and they want him to be OK. Me too,” she wrote.

“But I always bristled at that question from the press, because I couldn’t say what I wanted to say: “It’s his story to tell”.

Taking on his character Chandler Bing’s trademark sarcastic and self-deprecating wit, Perry took readers through a grim and graphic account of his addiction, sparing the usual whitewashed accounts of celebrity lives.

A combination of childhood trauma, and a Vicodin prescription after a jet skiing accident pushed Perry to drugs and alcohol.

After the show finished in 2004, Perry went from making $1 million a show to taking 55 Vicodin pills a day.

He opened up about raiding homeowners’ pill cabinets while attending five open houses a day to spending $350,000 on private jets in 24 hours flying between rehab clinics.

Over 20 years, he checked into rehab 15 times, attended 6000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and had several near-death experiences.

Perry detailed in his book how his heart stopped for five minutes while in rehab, as a “beefy” Swiss guy gave him CPR, cracking eight ribs, but saving his life.

Detoxing again in 2018, Perry’s colon exploded after being rushed to hospital, falling into a two-week coma. Doctors said he had a two per cent chance of making it.

Dying at age 54, Perry had not married, having previously dated Julia Roberts in the 1990s, and actor Lizzy Kaplan more recently.

One of the biggest regrets from the book is that he had no family of his own. “(There have been) at least five women I could have married and had children with,” Perry wrote.

“Had I done so, I would not now be sitting in a huge house overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with save a nurse, a sober companion, and a gardener twice a week.”