Matthew Perry has reportedly died, according to US media reports. The actor who was best known for playing Chandler Bing on Friends was 54.
Perry was found dead at a Los Angeles area home on Saturday (Oct 28). TMZ reported that Perry was found in a jacuzzi at the home and no drugs were found at the scene.
According to law enforcement sources who spoke to the Los Angeles Times, he was found unresponsive at 4pm at his home and the cause of death will be determined at a later date by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.
The Canadian actor was raised in Ottawa, Canada. He attended elementary school with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
His mother, Suzanne Morrison, was a journalist and press secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father.
Perry relocated to Los Angeles as a teenager and landed TV guest spots on Boys Will Be Boys, Growing Pains and Sydney. However, his big break came in 1994 with NBC’s iconic sitcom Friends.
Friends was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 90s. The cast made up of Perry and co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer famously earned a whopping US$1 million (S$1.37 million) per episode.
He played commitment-phobe Chandler Bing for 10 seasons and landed an Emmy nomination in 2002.
Despite his success, Perry had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, seeking treatment in 1997 and 2001. He told Britain’s BBC Radio 2 in 2016 that he didn’t remember filming seasons 3 through 6 of Friends.
The Friends star opened up about his decades-long battle with addiction in a memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing which was published in 2022.
Perry went to rehab 15 times and had undergone 14 surgeries to try and mitigate the damage done to his stomach lining due to alcohol and opioid use.
The actor claimed that he almost died due to a gastrointestinal perforation in 2018 and spent months in the hospital.
“The doctors told my family that I had a 2 per cent chance to live,” Perry shared during a promotional interview for his book last year. “I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.”
In recent years, Perry declared that he had finally beat his addictions.
In an interview with People in November, Perry declared that he’s “a pretty healthy guy right now”.
“What I’m most surprised with is my resilience. The way that I can bounce back from all of this torture and awfulness,” he added. “Wanting to tell the story, even though it’s a little scary to tell all your secrets in a book, I didn’t leave anything out. Everything’s in there.”
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