Inside Matthew Perry's Tragic Real-Life Story

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Back in 2020, Matthew Perry had been cast in the Netflix movie "Don't Look Up" as part of an all-star cast including Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jennifer Lawrence. In "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing," Perry recalled being in a treatment center in Switzerland around this time, where he was awaiting surgery. As he wrote, he lied to doctors about his symptoms in order to procure a prescription for hydrocodone, an opioid-based painkiller. What he hadn't factored in was that he'd be given the anesthetic propofol for that surgery. When the two medications combined, the result nearly cost him his life. 

"I was given the shot at 11 a.m.," Perry wrote, as excerpted by E! News. "I woke up 11 hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes." According to Perry, it may have been his celebrity status that wound up saving 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. If I hadn't been on 'Friends,' would he have stopped at three minutes? Did 'Friends' save my life again?" 

Unfortunately, Perry was forced him to drop out of the film, because all that CPR broke eight of his ribs. "Don't Look Up" was ultimately nominated for four Oscars.

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