Anyone who has seen Gravity or Out of Sight will understand immediately that the real secret of George Clooney’s long reign as Hollywood’s leading man is that he possesses the loneliest voice in American cinema. Behind the sparkling eyes, the quick mischief and the playful quips, there is a natural melancholy in every utterance.
That trait was less evident in Matthew Perry, the late, lamented comedian. Perry was just 54 when he was found facedown in his own hot tub last October, having finally lost a bitter battle with alcohol and prescription drugs. This week, five people were charged in connection with his death, including his personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa and Dr. Salvador Plasencia, a doctor who supplied the actor with the vials of ketamine and lozenges that ultimately killed him.
Little by little, an account of Perry’s fragmented final days is coming together. It is a desperate story. On the day of his death, he had received his first ketamine injection at 8:30 a.m. and then watched a movie. Later, he asked Iwamasa to prepare the hot tub and asked for another ketamine injection. He told his assistant, “Give me a big syringe.”
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Court records showed that Plasencia texted a friend, Dr. Mark Chavez, who pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine, saying, “I wonder how much this idiot is going to pay.”
Perry had the financial means to fund his drug addiction. The extraordinary lengths he went to to feed his addiction were detailed in Friends, Lovers and The Terrible Thing, the biting and harrowing memoir he wrote with the clarity he needed over the past few years. It was published in late 2022. By that time, Perry’s physical decline had shocked millions of fans when he appeared with his co-stars at a Friends reunion show the year before.
The show’s popularity was not diminished by the fact that its final episode aired in 2004. It is considered one of the landmarks of the 1990s, and of pre-9/11 New York in particular. And its worldwide popularity left Perry and his co-stars in a strange in-between world where they could never quite shake off their alter egos. Perry had a wide comedic range, but his portrayal of Chandler Bing, the nervous, sarcastic joker of the group, made it difficult for audiences to imagine him as anyone else.
The strangeness of this predicament, the inexplicable wealth, the pressures of fame and his descent into a nightmare of opioids and prescription drugs are all laid out in raw, unfiltered detail in his book. The reality is as far from the cozy safety of the Friends apartment as one could imagine. And during his promotional interviews, the power of Perry’s voice and tone suggested a much greater range and potential than the wild success of Friends had allowed him. He was heartbroken from the start. He chased conventional fame, got it and found it answered nothing
“I achieved the American dream,” he said in an interview in 2022. “I got the great job, I was good at it. I bought a house. The house had a pool… you know, I had the American dream. And I really, really liked it. I loved it for about six months. And then I walked into the house and thought, oh man. This doesn’t fix my problem. It doesn’t solve the problem.”
( Matthew Perry: “There is a hell. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I’ve been there.”Opens in new window. )
Perry said the reason for his book’s success and why “it’s gotten into the hearts of so many people is because everyone is starting to experience addiction or have an addiction in their life. People have a brother or sister or grandfather or close friend who is an addict in their life and they need to experience from the addict’s point of view, in this case mine, how horrible that is. They’re not weak. We’re not weak. I’m a pretty strong, resilient guy, but that has nothing to do with weakness. It’s a disease that we have and we don’t know we have.”
The US National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics has plenty of numbers to prove this. Nearly 10 million Americans ages 12 and older abuse opioids at least once a year. Of these, 2.7 million suffer from opioid use disorder. Perry was one of 107,543 Americans who died of a drug overdose in 2023.
Because he was who he was, his death caused an enormous outpouring of grief and sympathy from the public. His appearances promoting his book, when he was back on television screens, battered but still warm, self-deprecating and quick-witted, had convinced fans that he must be fine if he was back on screen. But it was only a brief respite, a sigh of relief from what was, in retrospect, a horrific existence in a gilded cage. Apart from anything else, American society lost someone who could have been a powerful advocate for drug education.
Perry was a child of the 1970s, a generation that plunged into alcohol and drugs without knowing the consequences. In one passage of his book, he recalls his brief friendship with River Phoenix, the brilliant young actor who died of a drug overdose outside a nightclub near Perry’s home in 1993:
“I heard the screams coming from my apartment, went back to bed and woke up to the news. After his death, his mother wrote in reference to drug use, ‘The spirits of (River’s) generation are being worn down,’ and by that point I was drinking every night. But it would be years before I understood exactly what she meant.”
