Matthew Perry wanted to be remembered for helping people. Reading his book helped me

Even though I’m a huge fan of FriendsI can’t say I’m thrilled with the much publicized reunion of Friends proposed by HBO Max in 2021. Why? For the simple reason that the stars and creators of the series refused to script the one-off event and the 104-minute special was therefore, for the most part, a repetition of anecdotes already heard behind the scenes, peppered with some interludes of great impact.

However, there is a moment in that reunion that I have thought about a lot over the past couple of years. It’s about the moment when Matthew Perry – who he played Chandler Bingthe most sarcastic of the gang – he reveals crippling anxiety which he felt even after the series had become a huge, era-defining success. When she appeared before the public of Friends in the studio, Perry confessed to his five colleagues: «I was afraid I would die if they didn’t laugh. And it certainly wasn’t healthy. But sometimes I would say a joke and they wouldn’t laugh, and I would sweat and get anxious if I didn’t get the laugh I needed and wanted to get. I was freaking out…. I felt like that every single night.”

The special stops after Perry’s admission, to move on to easier and happier topics. I, on the other hand, would have preferred if he had focused a little more on Perry’s words, especially because it is the only moment in which the reunion recognises, even if only obliquely, the problems the actor had to deal with, the risks to his mental health, his alcoholism and his drug addiction. In retrospect, these aspects loom large Friends like a fog.

Perry died on October 28 at the age of 54. We still don’t know the official reasons, he was found in a hydromassage tub, but according to the first rumors he did not die from causes related to drug use. What we know is that he was such a good actor that he was able to make people laugh with a joke even if hidden inside a wooden box (4/8), or even make people laugh out loud simply by growling the name “Jill Goodacre”… Which it was possible to watch 236 episodes of Friends without realizing how tormented he was behind the scenes.

In the early seasons of the series, Chandler could be “hopeless, clumsy and desperate for love,” as he said in one memorable scene. But at his peak, Perry never seemed to force himself. Even more than his talented colleagues, he made comedy seem natural, obvious. It’s possible to imagine an actress who can successfully step into the shoes of Monica, a messy girl, or an actor into those of Joey, a tender-hearted bully. Chandler, however, is inseparable from the man who played him.

Yet there are entire seasons of Friends, said Perry, who doesn’t remember shooting. The best-seller that you published in 2022 is entitled Friends, Lovers and the Terrible Thingover 300 pages illustrating how hard and long Perry fought: the illness that led to 15 stays of rehabilitation65 sessions of detox14 surgical interventions for his body ravaged by opioids. “I must have spent something like $9 million trying to detox,” he told the BBC last year. New York Times. While making TV’s most popular series, Perry was the proverbial duck, appearing to glide gracefully as her legs flapped beneath the surface. It would be years before we realized how frantically she moved.

As older millennials are wont to do, I re-watched all seasons of Friends More and more times. I started watching the series live on NBC when I was too young to understand Monica’s affection for the number seven or why Ross briefly had a monkey. (Actually, David Schwimmer never understood this either.) The year she graduated, my sister Anni and I held our breath during the series finale, only breathing when Rachel got off the plane for Paris.

I loved Friendsbut Anni loved it Friends. She could carry on an entire conversation with nothing but Phoebe Buffay quotes. One year she put a massage chair, inspired by Joey and Chandler, in her college room, and she suffered terribly when space constraints forced her to get rid of it – even though she sold it well. “It’s called capitalism,” she told me later. “Even if it’s clear, it doesn’t convince me.”

Like Chandler, my sister had some unique sayings. Like Matthew Perry, she was very good at hiding her drug addiction, until she crushed it.

I read and watched countless books, films and television shows about drug addiction in the 15 years after his fatal overdose, as if by studying hard enough I could make sense of an unforgettable loss. I’ve found that these stories tend to follow the same pattern: a character gets injured at work or while playing sports, then is duped by predatory marketing and Big Pharma representatives into taking painkillers that he doesn’t need. Within a short time, the character became addicted.

I suspect this narrative persists for two reasons: Because these tactics have indeed trapped countless people in addiction opioids before regulators noticed, and because evidently tragic victimhood is easy for the public to digest. But although Perry says he started taking Vicodin after a jet ski accident, his memoir tells a different truth. In Friends, Lovers and the Terrible Thing, takes sole responsibility for your problems; he speaks candidly about the profound insecurity that led him to drink for the first time at 14, about his insatiable hunger for fame and recognition, about the relationships he ruined, from adolescence onwards, with his selfish and cruel behavior. (Some of these behaviors can be attributed to drug use, but not all.)

He speaks frankly about the boredom of dependence, the arduous effort of procuring enough pills to get through the day, the constant mental calculations necessary to keep withdrawal symptoms at bay and the monotony of a life always teetering between detox and relapse. In a passage that stuck with me, just like the reunion scene, Perry writes that he would trade places with anyone else “in a minute, and forever, if only I could not be who I am, as I am, tied to this wheel of fire . The others don’t have a brain that wants them dead.”

It’s dark, difficult material, the opposite of something as simple and enjoyable as Friends. But it is also insightful, the rare narrative of addiction that goes beyond cliché, perhaps because Perry wrote it not to dramatize his illness but expressly to help his fellow addicts. As a person paralyzed by the mere idea that his audience wouldn’t laugh hard enough at one of his jokes, Perry must have had enormous courage to reveal and write down how unlikable his addiction made him, to confess that it drove him to fly back and forth from the Switzerland, with a private plane, just to get his dose. During the height of the Covid pandemic, reading his book made me realize that maintaining sobriety must be a lot like grieving: It means persevering despite the big, terrible thing looming just outside your field of vision, a thing which is sometimes closer and sometimes further away, but which has never completely disappeared.

How terrible it must have been for Perry to endure this for so long. How brave of you, Perry, to keep trying.