“I said a stupid thing. It was a mean thing to do,” Perry confessed.
One of the biggest things to come out of his memoir was that he revealed that he suffered a near-death experience in 2019.
As a result of his opioid addiction, Perry’s colon burst, and he had to undergo serious surgery. Doctors put his chances of survival at just 2 percent.
“I will have to live out the rest of my days knowing that my mother and others heard those words,” he wrote about the incident.
Thankfully, Perry did survive, but faced a 2 week-long coma, 5 months in hospital and 9 months of using a colostomy bag.
“I had realised that my greatest fear had come true, which is that I did this to myself,” he said.
However, Perry’s addiction issues predated this incident by some margin. In fact, he recently opened up to CBC that he won’t rewatch Friends, which ran from 1994 to 2004, because he knows what substances he was on during each season.
“I was taking fifty-five Vicodin a day, I weighed 128 lbs, I was on Friends getting watched by thirty million people — and that’s why I can’t watch the show, ‘cause I was brutally thin,” he said.
“I didn’t watch the show, and haven’t watched the show, because I could go, ‘Drinking, opiates, drinking, cocaine’.
“I could tell season by season by how I looked. That’s why I don’t wanna watch it, because that’s what I see.”
He went on to illustrate one particularly bad day of filming on set.
“At one point I was shaking so much that if I was gonna go from the bookshelf to the table, I’d have to quickly do it and put my hand on the table so I wouldn’t shake,” he revealed. “It got that bad.”
He even began to well up during the interview: “You know, the thing that always makes me cry — and I hope I don’t cry here — is that it’s not fair. It’s not, it’s not fair.
“It’s not fair that I had to go through this disease while the other 5 didn’t. They got everything that I got, but I had to fight this thing — and still have to fight this thing.”
In his memoir, Perry discusses one of his late co-stars, River Phoenix from the 1988 movie A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.
Phoenix died aged twenty-two after an overdose.
Perry writes: “River was a beautiful man, inside and out – too beautiful for this world, it turned out. It always seems to be the really talented guys who go down.
“Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us?”
Per the BBC, Perry admitted during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books that the comment regarding Reeves was ‘mean’ and ‘stupid’.
“I pulled his name because I live on the same street. I’ve apologised publicly to him,” he said.
“Any future versions of the book will not have his name in it.”
