Perry opened up about the relationship in his recent memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
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.”
Another thing that Perry has opened up about during his time on the cult sitcom was his brief relationship with co-star Julia Roberts.
Roberts expressed interest in appearing on the show if she had a storyline involved with Perry’s character Chandler Bing, which led to producers encouraging him to shoot his shot.
“I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read, ’The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,’” he recalled.
“Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift — bagels, lots and lots of bagels,” he said.
The pair were speaking for 3 months before filming, as Roberts was filming for a movie in France, so they communicated by flirting over fax. Then, when time finally came to film the episode of Friends together, they became offical.
However, just 2 months later, Perry ended things with her for a heartbreaking reason.
“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me,” he admitted. “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.”
He continued: “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.”
