Friends star Matthew Perry is opening up about his struggles with addiction ahead of the Nov. 1 release of his new book Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir.
During an interview with Diane Sawyer on Friday’s episode of ABC’s Nightline, Perry spoke about the lengths to which he’d go to fuel his past drug habit, revealing he used to go to open houses on Sundays to steal pills from strangers’ medicine cabinets.
“The weirdest thing I did was on Sundays I would go to open houses and go to the bathrooms...in the open house and see what pills they had in there and steal them,” he shared. “I think they thought, ‘Well, there’s no way that Chandler came in and stole from us.’”
At one point, Perry said he felt like he needed 55 Vicodin pills a day. Fortunately, the 53-year-old actor is on the path to recovery; he’s attended somewhere around 6,000 AA meetings, as well as countless therapy sessions and approximately 65 detox stints.
“The doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live,” he previously told People in a story published Oct. 19. “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.”
Stream Perry’s exclusive ABC interview now on Hulu.
