It seems like Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston were friends on and off the screen.
The Friends star, who played Chandler Bing on the hit sitcom, recently opened up about how his co-stars on the series were there for him while he was struggling with addiction — especially Aniston.
In a preview clip for his upcoming interview with Diane Sawyer, Perry said Aniston remained in close contact with him throughout his entire addiction struggle, which dated back to his mid-20s and early years on Friends.
“Jennifer, she says, ‘We know you’re drinking,’” Sawyer told Perry in the clip. “Yeah, imagine how scary a moment that was,” he replied.
He added, “She was the one that reached out the most. You know, I’m really grateful to her for that.”
The two-minute clip highlighted other parts from their Oct. 28 interview, like how at one point in his struggle, he was taking 55 Vicodin, methadone, Xanax and drinking a full quart of vodka all in one day.
“I should have been the toast of the town, but I was in a dark room meeting with nothing but drug dealers and completely alone,” Perry told Sawyer.
The interview comes on the heels of the actor’s recent People cover story — in which he got candid about his addiction in a way he hadn’t before — ahead of the Nov. 1 release of his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
“I thought being funny all the time was how I would get through,” he said in the story. “I thought [Friends] was going to fix everything. It didn’t.”
He also explained that while Aniston reached out to him the most, she wasn’t the only Friends star to rally around him.
“They were understanding, and they were patient,” Perry said. “It’s like penguins. In nature, when one is sick or very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up and walk around until that penguin can walk on its own. And that’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
