‘I am really grateful’: Matthew Perry says ‘Friends’ co-star Jennifer Anon confronted him about alcohol abuse

Contrary to his iconic portrayal of Chandler Bing in the superhit sitcom Friends, Matthew Perry has had a not-so-joyful run during the filming of the show as he dealt with chronic drug and alcohol addiction. But, the actor, who is now admittedly on the other side of addiction, is opening up about his long journey to sobriety and the struggles he faced.
In an excerpt from his book titled Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry recounted being confronted co-star Jennifer Anon despite never having been drunk on set. “‘I know you are drinking,’ she said,” the 53-year-old wrote in his memoir. “‘How can you tell?’ I said. I never worked drunk. ‘I’ve been trying to hide it …’”

The actor also revealed in his memoir that he had a crush on Anon during their time on the show. He wrote, “I had long since gotten over her – ever since she started dating Brad Pitt, I was fine – and had worked out exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward, but still, to be confronted Jennifer Anon was devastating. And I was confused.”
He added that Anon told him that “we can smell it”. “‘We can smell it,’ she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural ‘we’ hit me like a sledgehammer,” he wrote in the book.

“‘I know I’m drinking too much,’ I said, ‘but I don’t exactly know what to do about it.’”
Confirming the incident during an interview with Diane Sayer, Perry said, “Imagine how scary a moment that was. She was the one that reached out the most. I’m really grateful to her for that.”
Further detailing the depth of his addiction during the peak of his career, he said, “At the time I should have been the toast of the town. I was in a dark room meeting nothing but drug dealers and completely alone.”

He reveals that at a time, he was taking 55 Vicodin a day in addition to Methadone, Xanax and a full quart of vodka. He told Sawyer that he was “in a coma and escaped death really narrowly”.
Recently, in an interview with People, Perry said that he is finally in a place to talk about this side of his life. “I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again. I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober — and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction — to write it all down. And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people.”
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