The memoirs of former "Friends" star Matthew Perry (53) continue to cause a sensation. Perry's work, titled "Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing," will not be available until November 1, but it's now known in advance why the actor ultimately didn't appear in Netflix's hit film, "Don't Look Up," starring superstar Leonardo DiCaprio (47) was seen: Perry had suffered cardiac arrest during filming.
The terrible medical event took place in Switzerland during a rehabilitation stay, as "Rolling Stone" reports, citing Perry's memoirs. It was triggered by the combination of two drugs. Perry lied to his doctors to get the pain reliever hydrocodone. The star was then given the anesthetic propofol for an operation, after which his heart stopped on the operating table.
"I woke up eleven hours later in another hospital," Perry writes. The doctors treating him didn't want "the guy from 'Friends' to die on their table" during his cardiac arrest. During the five-minute CPR, Perry fractured eight ribs from chest compressions.
Due to the resulting pain, Perry was unable to return to the set of the Netflix film "Don't Look Up" and continue filming that had already begun. The 'Friends' star called the decision to leave the film "heartbreaking" as the star-studded comedy was his "biggest movie". An already twisted scene by Perry with Jonah Hill (38) did not make it into the Netflix version of the film.
As "Daily Mail" also reports in advance from Perry's memoirs, the 53-year-old also teases his actor colleague Keanu Reeves (58), one of the most popular Hollywood stars in his book. At the beginning of the 1990s, Perry was close friends with the two actors River Phoenix (1970-1993) and Chris Farley (1964-1997), who both died much too young due to drug abuse.
In his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry writes, "Why do original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger [1979-2008] die, but Keanu Reeves is still with us?". Elsewhere in his work, Perry says he "punched a hole in the wall of Jennifer Aniston's dressing room" when he found out his friend Farley died from a combination of cocaine and morphine, to add, "Keanu Reeves is among us."
These are just the two latest revelations from Perry's upcoming autobiography. It was previously revealed that the former "Friends" star briefly had a secret romance with Julia Roberts, 54, in the 1990s, spent a whopping $9 million to get sober, and then again at the age of 49 - similar to the episode described above - jumped to death when his intestines burst after taking too many painkillers. At that time, his life could only be saved by using a so-called ECMO machine.
