Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (13 page)

Throughout the making of the movie, I had been going through the script and pitching jokes to Andy Tennant, who was a very smart and incredibly nice guy. He sat on me—I was bouncing around doing my funny little things, and he would take me aside and say, “You don't have to do that. You're interesting enough to watch without doing that.”

That line of thinking allowed him to pull out of me one of the best performances of my career. Could this be a different way of saying
Matty, you're enough,
the words I've been longing to hear my entire life? (Andy went on to direct dozens of movies, including
Hitch,
starring Will Smith. Nice guys don't finish last, I guess.)

Andy was also open to hearing pitch ideas. One day my friend Andrew Hill Newman was visiting me on set and came up with the line, “You are everything I never knew that I always wanted.” I wrote it out and handed it to Andy Tennant, who loved it, and it became the most famous line in the movie. And movie-wise, probably the best line I ever said.

One day during shooting there had been a bunch of people in the background on Lake Mead on Jet Skis, and I asked if I could ride one during the lunch break. But this was the start of the movie, and I was told it was too dangerous.

But everything back then was a yes … so I just said, “Erm, you have to say yes to that.”

So, I headed out onto Lake Mead. The sun was high; the blue water crackled like a flame. As I zoomed around on the Jet Ski, in the distance I could see the Hoover Dam, where the climax of the movie would be shot, and Mount Wilson hovering over everything like a warning. But everything in my life was perfect. I had the most beautiful, famous woman in the world as my girlfriend; I was on the number one TV show in America; I was making a lot of money shooting a movie that could only be a number one box-office smash. I revved that Jet Ski hard, feeling the loose-soft connection to the water, turning this way and that, the chop bumping me up and down on the seat, my right hand turning and turning and turning, pushing that machine to its limit.

And then I turned the Jet Ski hard right, but my body went straight on. I was airborne, and then I was not airborne. Once I surfaced, I looked back to where I'd started, and there stood forty people on the shoreline, the entire crew, who had been watching me risk the entire movie, and who now all dove into Lake Mead to get me.

When I got back to shore, I knew I was hurt. That night, there was a big scene to shoot—the birth-of-the-baby scene, the key moment—and I had to be right for it. But everything was hurting; I had especially fucked up my neck. The crew knew I was struggling, so they called a doctor, who came by my trailer and handed me a single pill in a plastic package.

“Take this when you're done,” the doctor said. “Everything will be fine.”

I stashed that pill in my pocket, and I swear to God I think if I'd never taken it, none of the next three decades would have gone the way they did. Who knows? I just know it was really bad.

My character in
Fools Rush In
is a real estate developer who drives a red Mustang. The scene that night went on and on, but just before dawn we wrapped. I could sense the sun edging closer to the horizon.

“Hey, can I drive that Mustang home to Vegas, do you think?” I asked.

I'm amazed, after the Jet Ski debacle, that they said yes to anything right then. But they did.

The first light of that Nevada day was creeping over Mount Wilson when I left the lot. I put the top down of that Mustang and swallowed the pill. I thought about Julia; I thought about flying across Lake Mead, not a care in the world. I thought about my childhood, but it didn't hurt, not then. As the pill kicked in, something clicked in me. And it's been that click I've been chasing the rest of my life. I thought about fame and Craig Bierko and the Murray brothers and
Friends.
The summer was coming up, all pink cirrus clouds and soft, desert air.
This was my pink sky. I felt so good that if a locomotive hit me, I would simply turn to the engineer and say, “It happens, brother.” I was lying in the grass in Canada in my backyard, surrounded once again with Murray puke. I couldn't believe how good I felt; I was in complete and pure euphoria. The pill had replaced the blood in my body with warm honey. I was on top of the world. It was the greatest feeling I'd ever had. Nothing could ever go wrong. As I drove that red Mustang convertible to my rented house in Vegas, I remember thinking,
If this doesn't kill me, I'm doing this again.
This is a bad memory, of course, because of what followed, but it was also a good memory. I was close to God that morning. I had felt heaven—not many people get that. I shook hands with God that morning.

Was it God, or someone else?

My first move when I got home that morning was to get in touch with that doctor and tell him that the pill had worked for the pain (I decided to leave that God part out). I went to sleep, and when I woke up, forty more of those pills had been delivered to my house. Eureka!

Be careful, Matty, something that feels that good must come with consequences.
I know the consequences now—boy, do I ever. But I didn't know them then. I wish that was all there was to say about
Fools Rush In.
Fun, inside-baseball stories about how movies get made. Hate to burst the celebrity-industrial complex bubble, but there are real lives going on, too, behind the glamour and the martini shots and the A-cameras. However, what no one could tell was that someone's life, probably the least likely candidate, was about to plummet into the gates of hell.

A year and a half later, I was taking fifty-five of those pills a day. I weighed 128 pounds when I checked into Hazelden rehab in Minnesota, my life in ruins. I was in raw fear, certain I was going to die, having no idea what had happened to me. I wasn't trying to die; I was just trying to feel better.

Of course, “Matthew Perry is in rehab” became a huge news story. I was not even granted the opportunity to work out my problems in privacy. Everyone knew. It was on the covers of all the magazines—I didn't even get the anonymity everyone else got. I was terrified. I was also young, so I bounced back quickly. Within twenty-eight days, I was back on my feet again and looking healthy.

This was a big news story, too, but nowhere near the size of the other one.

Making movies is a completely different animal from making TV. On
Friends,
if you were sad about something you'd play it up, as though you're the saddest person in the world—basically, for the back row of the live audience. There's sort of a wink to the audience in your performance, too, as if to say, “Hey, everybody, watch this. You're going to enjoy this.” When you do a sitcom, it's like you're doing a one-act play every week. There are three hundred people in the audience, and you have to open up to them.

Film work is much, much slower—there's a master shot and then a closeup, and then an even
closer
closeup. And if your character was sad, you played him sad. There was no winking—this was the pros, baby. But on
Friends
we even
rehearsed
quickly. I remember Alec Baldwin guest starring once and saying, “You guys are going so fast!”

There were guest stars all the time, which meant we always had to think on our feet. Sean Penn was one of my favorites—he appeared in two episodes in season eight and nailed it. His story line called for me to be dressed up as a pink bunny rabbit (it was Halloween), so at the end of the table read, I said, “I've always dreamed of working with Sean Penn, but I never thought I'd have to wear a pink bunny rabbit suit to do so.”

Despite not having an actual fourth wall of the apartment,
Friends
never broke the metaphorical fourth wall, either. The closest we ever got was with Sean—I had pitched a tag (the brief end scene after the main story has landed) that had me backstage in the bunny rabbit suit. Sean walks by and I say, “Sean, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure, Matthew, what's up?”

“Well, I've been really giving this a lot of thought. And I think you're a good person to talk to about this.” I'm smoking as I say this, and as I put the cigarette out with my huge bunny foot, I say, “I've been looking to transition myself into dramatic work.”

Sean Penn looks me up and down for about five beats and just says, “Good luck.”

It got a great laugh at the table read. But it broke a rule we never broke in ten years. Even someone as powerful as Sean Penn and me looking ridiculous in a huge pink bunny costume could not get the go-ahead to break the fourth wall. It stayed in place. Right where it should be.

Everybody had their particular years on
Friends
when the whole world was talking about their character. David Schwimmer's was the first season; season two, it was Lisa; seasons five and six were Courteney and me; Jen was seasons seven and eight, and Matt (Most Improved Friend) was nine and ten. Some of them won Emmys for those seasons and all of us should have won more than we did, but I think there's a bias against attractive rich people with an apartment that's way too big for reality in New York City … except, as I always pointed out, there was no fourth wall.

During that first year—David's year—he showed up one day at my dressing room. He had brought an original hangdog expression to his character and was just damn funny. He was also the first one of us to shoot a commercial, be on
The Tonight Show,
buy a house, get his own
movie. He was the hot guy that first year, and rightly so. He had been hilarious.

That day in my dressing room, he sat down opposite me and started in.

“Matty,” he said, “I've been thinking. When we renegotiate our contracts, we should do it as a team. We should all get paid the same amount.” He was by far the one in the best position to negotiate. I could not believe what he was saying. Needless to say, I was thrilled. I was perfectly happy to take advantage of his generosity of spirit.

It was a decision that proved to be extremely lucrative down the line. David had certainly been in a position to go for the most money, and he didn't. I would like to think that I would have made the same move, but as a greedy twenty-five-year-old, I'm not sure I would have. But his decision served to make us take care of each other through what turned out to be a myriad of stressful network negotiations, and it gave us a tremendous amount of power. By season eight, we were making a million dollars per episode; by season ten we were making even more. We were making $1,100,040 an episode, and we were asking to do
fewer
episodes. Morons, all of us. We had David's goodness, and his astute business sense, to thank for what we had been offered. I owe you about $30 million, David. (We were still morons.)

Being on
Friends
was one of those unicorn situations where the news just kept getting better and better. But off-screen, things weren't going so well. In late April 1996, I went on Jay Leno and admitted I was single. Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me—why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can't begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.

I decided to party in Cape Cod with the Murray brothers. I have no idea why I chose Cape Cod, or why the Murray brothers came with me. I imagined it was just a new place to barhop. It was there that I noticed that something had changed, though—a new dynamic was at play. Girls were coming up and talking to me; the days of nervously approaching women with mediocre lines were over. I just stood in a corner, a vodka tonic in hand, and they came to me.

None of them were Julia Roberts, though.

I've detoxed over sixty-five times in my life—but the first was when I was twenty-six.

My Vicodin habit had now kicked in badly. If you watch season three of
Friends,
I hope you'll be horrified at how thin I am by the end of the season (opioids fuck with your appetite, plus they make you vomit constantly). In the final episode, you'll see that I'm wearing a white shirt, and tan slacks, and both look at least three sizes too big for me. (Compare this to the difference in how I look between the final episode of season six and the first of season seven—the Chandler-Monica proposal episodes. I'm wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven [it's supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season. My weight varied between 128 pounds and 225 pounds during the years of
Friends.
)

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.

By the end of season three, I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get fifty-five Vicodin a day—I had to have fifty-five every day, otherwise I'd get so sick. It was a full-time job: making calls, seeing doctors, faking migraines, finding crooked nurses who would give me what I needed.

It had taken me a while to realize what was happening. At the start, I'd been taking something like twelve a day, and then went cold turkey one day, and felt absolutely terrible.
Something's really wrong with me,
I thought, but I kept going and kept going.
I'll finish the season of
Friends
and then I'll get treatment for this.

I almost killed myself by that decision. Had the season lasted another month, I would no longer be here.

I was never high while I was working. I loved those people—I wanted to always step up for them, and I was the second baseman for the New York Yankees. But addiction wakes up before you do, and it wants you alone. Alcoholism will win every time. As soon as you raise your hand and say, “I'm having a problem,” alcohol sneers,
You're gonna
say
something about it? Fine, I'll go away for a while. But I'll be back.