'I would go to open houses and steal pills': Matthew Perry on his fight with 55 Vicodin-a-day addiction
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Matthew Perry has confessed to visiting open houses with the intent of collecting pills in order to support his daily 55 Vicodin addiction. In a recent interview, the 'Friends' star opened up about his fight with the addition and how he believed no one would suspect Chandler Bing, his lovable character from ‘Friends,’ as a ‘thief’.
Shedding more details on his terrifying fight with addiction, the 53-year-old told said Diane Sawyer from ABC News, “On Sundays, I would go to open houses and go to the bathrooms in the open house and see what pills they had in there and steal them. And I think they thought ‘Well, there's no way that Chandler came in and stole from us.’”
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Perry also dubbed his open house strategy the 'weirdest thing' he did in his efforts to get his 55 pills a day. The actor claimed that he faked having headaches in order to obtain the prescription drug Vicodin, believing that he would become ‘very unwell’ without it. “I did all sorts of things - a bunch of doctors, fake migraines, and all that stuff,” he explained. Perry claimed that he had been to a detox facility about 65 times. He also described sliding into a coma and almost escaping ‘death’, in the interview.
Meanwhile, In his upcoming memoir, ‘Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,’ which is scheduled to be released on November 1, Perry has opened up about the specifics of his struggle with substance misuse. The actor opened up about how his drug and alcohol addiction influenced how he appeared on TV in a snippet acquired by Page Six. He also stated that viewers of the NBC comedy series could tell how bad his drug usage was based on his weight and beard length. “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,” he reportedly wrote in his book.
According to Perry, after landing the part of Chandler Bing in 'Friends in 1994 the actor became an international sensation practically overnight. Behind the scenes, however, the actor was dealing with a downward spiral of drug addiction, alcoholism, and overdoses that gave him just a 2% chance of survival, despite appearing on film as the charming and funny guy who always had a smile on his face. In a recent interview with People magazine, Perry said that he turned to drugs as a way to cope with the immense fame and pressure that came with being a part of one of the most well-known shows of all time.
Perry also revealed that his drug and alcohol use led to the need for 14 stomach surgeries and 15 different stays in rehab. In 1997, Perry got into a jet ski accident and was prescribed Vicodin, a powerful and addictive pain medication that eventually turned into a years-long battle with addiction. The comic acknowledged to the publication that, at the height of his success, he was consuming 55 painkillers daily and had lost weight, weighing only 128 pounds.
