New Delhi: Matthew Perry, the FRIENDS star, first drank alcohol when he was just 14, a moment he recalled as one in which “he felt he was in heaven”, The One About Matthew Perry, a Netflix docuseries released Tuesday, revealed.
“I thought, ‘This must be the way that normal people feel all the time,’” Perry said in archival footage about gulping down a full bottle at 14.
His friends were initially unaware of his drinking, as he was “secretive” and “would drink alone,” his friend Marjorie Harris Newman said in Part 1 of the docuseries.
She speculated that alcohol reached “that very deep part of himself that always thought he was not enough.”
“He felt that becoming famous would fill that hole,” she said.
The three-episode Netflix docuseries explores the actor’s life, career, struggles with addiction and his untimely death.
Perry Perry rose to fame playing Chandler Bing on Friends, which ran for 10 seasons between 1994 and 2004. The sitcom has remained permanent in popular culture over the years, and has found new audiences through streaming. Perry died at the age of 54 on October 28, 2023.
Also Read: Matthew Perry is dead—and Chandler Bing is forever trapped on the orange couch at Central Perk
‘I wasn’t enough’
Perry grew up between two families, a situation that contributed to his feelings of inadequacy and made him believe he was ‘too needy.’
“The beliefs that I had were: I was too needy, I wasn’t enough, and I didn’t matter…my whole life was about trying to have those three things not be true,” Perry said in archival footage.
His father John Bennett Perry is also an actor, who even appeared on FRIENDS. Talking about his parents’ separation when he was a baby, Perry said, “The only way I would get to see my father on a regular basis was on television.”
When Perry was just five, he flew alone from his mother’s home in Montreal to visit his father in Los Angeles.
Recalling the experience, he said, “They put a thing on my head that said ‘unescorted minor’ and I was incredibly scared.”
Both his parents went on to start new families. His mother, Suzanne married Dateline anchor Keith Morrison, with whom she had four children. His father later married Debbie Boyle, and the couple welcomed a daughter, Mia Perry Bowick.
Perry battled a decades-long, severe struggle with alcohol, prescription opioids, and other substances, which he revealed in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. The Netflix docuseries dives deep into the childhood trauma which allegedly led to his addiction.
(Edited by Stela Dey)