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Matthew Perry Comes Clean
October 26, 2000 -
Matthew Perry's life lessons: Heavy drinking and poor eating habits can
prove troublesome, recovering from pancreatitis is a struggle--and
finding your soulmate while guzzling cocktails at the Sky Bar is an
exercise in futility.
All of these tidbits come out as the 31-year-old Friends star
finally spills his guts--and his pancreas--in the latest edition of
US Weekly, following a summer rife with health problems and unlucky
disasters, like that Porsche-meets-porch incident in May.
In an interview that hits newsstands Friday, Perry says he lost 20
pounds after being hospitalized last spring for acute pancreatitis,
a rare inflammation caused partly by years of alcohol abuse and
prescription drugs.
And although his character, Chandler, may look a bit frail in this
season's early episodes of Friends, Perry is now reportedly
fitter, happier and healthier--also healthy enough to tackle tabloid
rumors that he had been on drugs ("Not true"), or that he needed a
liver transplant ("That's absolutely false").
"In my case, it was hard living and drinking hard and eating poorly,
" he tells the mag. "You play, you pay."
"But there were no pills involved," he adds. "I learned my lesson
at Hazelden."
Hazelden is the drug treatment center in Minnesota that Perry
checked himself into three years ago, after getting hooked on
Vicodin, a painkiller he started taking after a Jet-Ski accident.
Since that time, the actor's weight has ballooned up and down. But
Perry tells the celeb magazine he's sober, feeling healthier than
ever and hasn't been to any of his old nightclub stomping grounds
in six months. He also says he's in a different frame of mind
nowadays, having grown tired of the partying lifestyle.
"I don't think I'm going to meet my wife at the Sky Bar," he says,
referring to a Sunset Strip nightspot. "I hope I don't. My father
told me the right girl for me is going to be sitting in the corner
talking to somebody. It's not the girl in the middle of the room
making everyone laugh."
Perry also pipes up about the May 20 incident in which he crashed
his Porsche into a house. The accident happened just hours after he
had been hospitalized.
"The irony was terrible," he says. "I was going to hang with my
father at his place outside L.A. I made the first corner around my
house on these really narrow streets, saw a courier van in the
middle, swerved to the right and--well, I don't really know what
happened--I crashed into this porch."
With those troubles out of the way, Perry says he's hoping to make
a fresh start of it in his next decade. Besides life ain't all that
bad, given that the Friends have returned to NBC with huge
ratings, and they're making $750,000 per episode. He's also
currently dating an unnamed "girl" who works "behind the camera" in
the entertainment industry.
"My twenties were about work--making enough money so that I could
do what I wanted to do--and partying, stuff like that," he tells
the magazine. "I think--I hope--my thirties are going to be more
about developing my social skills in a way I haven't done before so
that I get married in my thirties and have a child in my thirties."