Daily Times

Matthew Perry will never forget this scene in Friends. While the season seven finale in which his character Chandler weds Courteney Cox’s Monica is a favorite among many fans, the actor, 53, is sharing the personal reason this episode is particularly memorable to him.

“I married Monica,” he told The New York Times in an interview published Oct. 23, “and got driven back to the treatment center-at the height of my highest point in Friends, the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show-in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”

Perry is looking back at his battle with alcohol and prescription painkillers in his forthcoming memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. According to The New York Times, he recounts in the book how his co-stars expressed their concern for him during this time, including Jennifer Aniston who Perry notes at one point told him “in a kind of weird but loving way” that the group knew he had been drinking again.

“‘We can smell it,'” she said, per the publication, with Perry writing in his memoir, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.”

Perry, who told the newspaper he was also at one point taking 55 Vicodin a day, attended rehab several times over the years, with him estimating, “I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober.”

And while he continued to struggle with addiction-with him previously telling People his colon burst from opioid overuse in 2018 and that he spent two weeks in a coma as well as five months in the hospital-he didn’t give up on his journey and is now sober. And his co-stars never gave up on him, either.

“It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it,” Lisa Kudrow told The New York Times. “What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”

She added, “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the Friends theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”