Matthew Perry was privately struggling with his sobriety and recovering from a near-fatal health crisis when he appeared alongside his former “Friends” co-stars for the 2021 HBO Max reunion special, according to people close to the actor who spoke for the new Netflix documentary “The One About Matthew Perry.”
Perry’s friend Kevin Pollak says in the documentary that the actor “is just not himself” in footage from the special. Pollak says Perry had not appeared on camera in some time and was “struggling with sobriety” while under “a lot of pressure” during filming.
Perry’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, says in the documentary that her brother’s health had kept him largely out of public view since 2018. “Because his health was so bad, he hadn’t really been out in public since 2018,” she says. Perry was “very nervous about coming back out” for the reunion, which reunited him on screen with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer.
Bowick says her brother wanted the appearance to signal that he was fine, even though that image was “only sort of half-true” at the time. Viewers took notice anyway, raising concerns about his health on social media after the special aired.
The 2018 health crisis
Bowick traces her brother’s diminished “energy and life force” to a 2018 medical emergency in which his colon burst as a result of opioid use. Perry wrote about the ordeal in his 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers and The Big Terrible Thing,” describing a two-week coma, a five-month hospital stay and nine months with a colostomy bag.
Doctors told Bowick that Perry’s colon had ruptured in multiple places, triggering “intense sepsis” throughout his body. He underwent several surgeries, and at one point doctors placed him on an ECMO machine, which Bowick describes as “basically like an iron lung.”
“His fingertips were turning black. There was a possibility that he would lose his fingers,” Bowick says.
Learning that opioid use had caused the crisis felt like “a slap in the face,” Bowick says, explaining that “opioids can slow down your digestive track dramatically.” She says she initially felt angry with her brother, thinking, “You did this to yourself, man… That was really really really hard,” while also grappling with the grief that comes with watching a loved one struggle with substance abuse.
Bowick recalls the hospital stay as the first time she thought her brother might not wake up. When he was finally discharged, she says, “he was still in really really bad shape… He had a completely open wound in his gut that wasn’t fully and completely healed. He had a colostomy bag. He aged 20 years in three months. He could barely walk.”
Facing the cameras again
The “Friends” reunion marked Perry’s first major public appearance after that ordeal. Former “Friends” writer and producer Jeff Strauss says in the documentary that Perry seemed aware he could not meet expectations. “In the reunion, I think Matthew… knew he couldn’t get to the place that everybody would want him to be… I think he was really aware of that,” Strauss says.
After filming wrapped, Bowick says her brother felt “relieved” and “tired.” “He was kind of at this place of ‘How am I gonna keep going?’ I know he was really scared, I know he was really fighting for his life,” she says. Part of him, she adds, did not believe a sober life was possible. While she refused to give up hope, Bowick says she eventually came to think of his addiction “as a terminal illness.”
Perry died at 54 in his hot tub at his California home on Oct. 28, 2023. An autopsy attributed his death to the “acute effects of ketamine” and drowning.
“The One About Matthew Perry” is now streaming on Netflix.
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