Matthew Perry is speaking out about his “heartbreaking” decision to pull out of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up after his heart stopped for five minutes at a Swiss rehab center in his new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
Perry, who starred as Chandler Bing on the hit NBC sitcom Friends, was set to play the role of a Republican journalist in the star-packed Netflix film. The actor had already shot a scene with star Jonah Hill when the health scare forced him to pull out of the project, which Perry says would have been the “biggest movie I’d gotten ever.”
The actor, 53, had been embroiled in a decades-long battle with addiction and was already in a rehab center in Switzerland when filming for Don’t Look Up began. Having lied to doctors about severe stomach pain to obtain a hydrocodone prescription, Perry was scheduled for surgery to “put some kind of weird medical device in my back.”
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But the hydrocodone Perry took the night before the procedure interacted with propofol, an anesthesia drug, and the combination stopped his heart.
“I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m. I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack—I didn’t flatline—but nothing had been beating,” the actor writes in an excerpt shared with Rolling Stone.
Matthew Perry Says He Almost Died from Opioid Abuse in 2018
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While a “beefy Swiss guy” quickly jumped to the actor’s rescue, performing CPR on Perry for the full five minutes until his heart was able to resume beating on its own, he says it may have been his fame that ultimately saved his life.
“I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest,” the actor recalled. “If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?”
Though Perry survived the scary ordeal, he was left with several broken ribs from the incident, adding, “He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight of my ribs.”
In too much pain to continue filming Don’t Look Up, Perry made the “heartbreaking” decision to step away from the project, which also starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep. The scene Perry shot with Hill was ultimately cut from the film’s theatrical release.
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is available for pre-order now and hits shelves on November 1.
