Matthew Perry’s inner circle is opening up about the actor’s fragile state before his final on-camera bow.
Kevin Pollak, a longtime friend of the late star, says in Netflix’s new documentary “The One About Matthew Perry” that watching the 2021 HBO Max reunion special is painful because Perry, 54 at his death, “was just not himself.” Pollak notes that Perry hadn’t been on camera in some time and was “struggling with sobriety” while feeling “a lot of pressure” during the production.
The reunion marked Perry’s first major public outing after years of seclusion. His sister, Mia Perry Bowick, explains in the documentary that “because his health was so bad, he hadn’t really been out in public since 2018.” When Perry committed to reuniting with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer, Bowick says he was “very nervous about coming back out.”
“He wanted to be like, ‘I’m here. I’m good, everything’s fine,'” Bowick shared in the Netflix doc. “But that was only sort of half-true.”
The gap between Perry’s public face and private reality traced back to a catastrophic health crisis three years earlier. In 2018, the actor’s colon burst from opioid overuse, an ordeal he detailed in his 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers and The Big Terrible Thing.” Bowick recalls doctors telling her that Perry’s colon had ruptured in several places, causing “intense sepsis” throughout his entire body.
“At one point the decision was made to put him on an ECMO machine, which is basically like an iron lung,” Bowick says in the documentary. “His fingertips were turning black. There was a possibility that he would lose his fingers.”
The near-death experience left lasting damage. Bowick describes her brother coming home from the hospital with “a completely open wound in his gut that wasn’t fully and completely healed,” plus a colostomy bag. “He aged 20 years in three months. He could barely walk,” she recounts.
Learning that opioids caused the crisis hit Bowick hard. “Opioids can slow down your digestive track dramatically,” she explains, calling the discovery “a slap in the face.” She admits she was “angry at him” at the time, thinking, “You did this to yourself, man…That was really really really hard.” The hospital stay was the first time she looked at her brother and believed he might not wake up.
Jeff Strauss, a former “Friends” writer and producer, observes in the documentary that Perry entered the reunion knowing his limitations. “In the reunion, I think Matthew… Knew he couldn’t get to the place that everybody would want him to be,” Strauss says. “I think he was really aware of that.”
Viewers picked up on the disconnect, flooding social media with concern about Perry’s health after the special aired. What the audience couldn’t see was the relief and exhaustion Bowick says Perry felt once filming wrapped.
“He was kind of at this place of ‘How am I gonna keep going?'” Bowick shares in the doc. “I know he was really scared, I know he was really fighting for his life.”
Part of Perry “did not think it was possible to live a sober life,” she adds. While she refused to abandon hope, Bowick began approaching his addiction “as a terminal illness.”
The documentary arrives more than a year after Perry was found dead in his California hot tub on Oct. 28, 2023. An autopsy determined he died from the “acute effects of ketamine” combined with drowning.
“The One About Matthew Perry” is now streaming on Netflix.