Now Magazine, 15th November, 2000
I thought I could drink and be happy.
Friends' Matthew Perry talks of his shock at finding that his partying
had caught up with him.
He just loved to party, but Matthew Perry says his recent health scare
has jolted him into giving up the booze and made him realise that what
he really wants now is a wife and kids.
What was the story behind the pancreatitis you
suffered from this year?
My drinking and partying caught up with me. If you spend enough years
living it up, your body pays the price. When I went to the hospital
in May, I thought I just needed a check-up. Instead, I got a good
scare when they told me I wasn't allowed to go home. It was enough to
straighten me out. No more drinking, no more nightclubs. I'm going
to be a good boy now.
A lot of people were worried about you.
I was worried myself. Pancreatitis is a serious condition, but I
never imagined I'd have to spend nearly 3 weeks in hospital. Then you
get the message that your body isn't just a tank that you can pour any
kind of fuel into.
As my punishment, I was eating chicken soup for a month and obviously
you're going to lose a lot of weight if that's the only stuff the
doctors let you eat!
Is it disturbing to read stories saying that you
need a liver transplant?
Well, you want to make sure your doctors aren't hiding anything from
you! It was irresponsible reporting, but I can also understand how
audiences might have been worried after seeing the first episode of
the new Friends series in America, where I was really, really skinny.
But I hadn't completely recovered by that point and, by the second
episode, you can see I'm looking a lot better.
I just needed to be able to eat normally again after being under a
strict diet for a few months.
I appreciate all the get-well letters I got and I want everybody to
know that I'm in the best shape of my life today. I'm playing tennis
again, I'm working out every morning with a fitness coach and I'm
stone-cold sober. I've even forgotten all of the names of my
favourite bartenders!
Did you do a lot of soul-searching in hospital?
It definitely made me think about the kind of life I was living.
Like, why are you abusing yourself and why aren't you playing tennis
anymore - a sport I once thought about playing professionally - and
why do you need to drink to be happy? The answer is: I thought my
twenties were about enjoying life to the maximum and not thinking about
tomorrow. But I'm 31 now and I want to spend my thirties putting down
some roots: get married, start a family and be a more responsible
individual.
Why haven't you had much success in finding a
soul mate?
I think I wasn't very attentive. I'd meet someone new, go out with
her for a short time, then I'd back off or she would. I wasn't ready
mentally to accept someone in my life for the long term. It was a
combination of fear and immaturity.
But I've been seeing someone lately who's not an actress and had been
good to me and I'm trying to be good to her.
In the worst moments of the contract negotiations
on Friends earlier this year, did you ever think it was time to leave?
I never gave up, no matter how bad things looked. We all love doing
the show and it would have been a huge trauma for us to have seen it
end that way.
Friends is too good a show to consider leaving voluntarily. The way
my movie career's been going over the years, it wouldn't be a very
intelligent move to quit one of the biggest TV shows in history!
Are you similar to Chandler in any way?
I'm much sexier than he is and probably not as insecure, although my
friends will tell you I can be just as neurotic and full of anxiety as
he is. I'm a little more introverted.
Your life first became the subject of rumours
about your health when you left the show to enter rehab several years
ago.
I made it easy for the Press by becoming addicted to painkillers,
which I started taking after I had my wisdom teeth removed. Working
on a TV series is very exhausting and I found these pills made it
easier for me to get by with less sleep. Before I knew it, I was
taking five times the normal dosage and I was totally dependent on the
stuff. It was scary. So I checked myself into rehab, straightened
myself out, then went back to work.
Did the speculation about hard drugs bother you
then?
I'd lost a lot of weight while on the pills, because you don't feel
like eating. So I knew people would assume I was doing hard drugs,
which I wasn't.
Why do TV series place such a strain on actors?
It's mostly exhaustion. Before I went into rehab three years ago, I
squeezed in two movies, Fools Rush In and Almost Heroes, while still
working on Friends and I wound up working 60 days straight, sleeping
in my trailer the whole time and never giving myself a chance to relax.
I'd become greedy. That schedule turned me into a physical wreck
and I'm never going to do that again, no matter how much money is on
the table.
You've dated beautiful women, including Julia
Roberts, and you're making $20 million a year. Does that make you a
babe magnet?
I wish that were true, but when working on a TV series you have
absolutely no social life. You're so exhausted that even a date with
a supermodel on Friday isn't an automatic yes. I'm also hopeless when
it comes to chasing girls. I usually get very nervous and paralysed
with anxiety if I'm at a party and there's this beautiful babe I'm
dying to meet. I usually have to beg a friend to go up and introduce
me to her. I'm a major-league coward when it comes to asking women
out!
How do you feel about your life these days?
Better than ever. I'm finally evolving into a semblance of a mature
human being who doesn't need to be involved with extreme lifestyle
sports anymore. That's the wisdom that comes with eating 4,000 bowls
of chicken soup in a single summer!
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