When Matthew Perry returned to film the global hit series Friends for its seventh season, he was noticeably thinner.
Offering what went wrong with his appearance, the late actor wrote in his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir, “You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season — when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.”
To sum up, Perry’s weight changes, according to him, were an indicator of the substance addiction he has been struggling with.
The memoir’s revelation apparently connects to the anecdote and to the account of his brother’s rehab by the late actor’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, during season seven of the Netflix docuseries The One About Matthew Perry.
She recalled, “Both sides of the family came to the filming to watch them get married. It was a really big deal, because we’re all worried about him. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”
“To try to navigate relationships while also battling this crippling addiction is, I would say, near impossible,” Perry’s sister recounted.
“So I think the unspoken truth that we all were sitting with in some way or another was, ‘Is this his wedding? ’”
“I was on set, and I remember watching Monica walk down the aisle, and when Matthew said his vows to her, the emotion in his eyes – everything was so real,” she noted.
The One About Matthew Perry is streaming on Netflix.
