"I should be dead".
These are the opening lines of actor Mathew Perry's memoir 'Friends, Lovers and Big Terrible Things'.
The 54-year-old actor was found dead in an apparent drowning on Saturday night at his Los Angeles home.
He became a household name after being cast as one of the six leading actors in the iconic sitcom 'Friends' along with Lisa Kudrow, Courtney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc. The show's wild success had put the spotlight on all six.
Perry played Chandler Bing, a sarcastic, witty man and insecure man who was awkward around women.
The sitcom aired between 1994 to 2004.
Post its run, Perry had revealed in his memoir that he had been struggling with addiction since his days in 'Friends'. He admitted that he found it hard to watch the show because it reminded him of what he had gone through at the time.
The actor had mentioned that he started drinking at the age of 14 to cope with his parents' separation. His father is actor John Bennett Perry and his mother, Suzanne, served as press secretary of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and is married to “Dateline” correspondent Keith Morrison.
But by the age of 18, Perry was drinking every day.
Perry once had said that he felt too sorry for the guy (himself) as he was going through so much. He added that we can track the trajectory of his addiction if we watch his weight from season to season of 'Friends'.
Matthew Perry (File | AP)In one of his interviews with Diane Sawyer, he said that he used to take 55 Vicadine pills a day. "I had to wake up and realise that I need 55 of them or I will get sick and I did all sorts of things for it."
In his memoir, he wrote: “I felt like I was gonna die if the live audience didn’t laugh, and that’s not healthy for sure. But I could sometimes say a line and the audience wouldn’t laugh and I would sweat and sometimes go into convulsions,” Perry wrote. “If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get I would freak out. I felt that every single night. This pressure left me in a bad place. I also knew of the six people making that show, only one of them was sick.”
Before the release of his memoir, in an interview with The New York Times, Perry had said all the happy moments in the sitcom were tainted with some dark moments in his life at the time. He told NYT that after the finale of Season 7, he was driven back to the rehab centre.
"[I was] at the height of my highest point in 'Friends', the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show," he told NYT. "When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is."
Although he was never drunk or on drugs on set, Perry had admitted that he used to be hungover when he came to work. Perry also said he was thankful to his co-actors for being patient with him.
He recalled in his memoir that Aniston confronted him about being inebriated while filming. “I know you’re drinking,” he remembered her telling him once. “We can smell it,” she said, in what Perry called a “kind of weird but loving way, and the plural ‘we’ hit me like a sledgehammer.”
David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc pose after "Friends" won outstanding comedy series at the 54th Primetime Emmy Awards Sept. 22, 2002, in Los Angeles. (File | AP)Perry had also said that when everyone was crying when the show ended, he felt nothing but numbness. "I felt nothing; I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside," the actor had written in his memoir.
During several of his interviews, Perry had mentioned how during his long battle with addiction, he had several relapses. But he always fought back and went back on track.
He had once mentioned in an interview with CBS that he hoped to watch 'Friends' someday.
Actor Matthew Perry poses in his hotel bedroom in New York, Aug. 7, 2002. (AP)
