‘Friends’ creators asked Matthew Perry if he wanted to leave the show during addiction struggles

nypost.com:

the late actor and learning of his addiction during the show in an interview with The Times U.K. published Friday.“By the time we became aware of it, we were already a family on a lot of levels,” said Crane, 67.“There was a point where we said to him: ‘Do you want to stop [being in the show]?’ And he was adamantly like: ‘No, this is really important to me,’ ” Crane recalled.Perry played Chandler Bing on the beloved NBC sitcom, which aired from 1994 to 2004.In his 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry opened up about his addiction and how it affected his performance on “Friends.”“You can track the trajectory for my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,” Perry wrote in his book.“When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills.

When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills,” he said.Perry revealed that one of his stints in rehab took place immediately after filming Chandler’s wedding to Monica Geller (Courteney Cox).

He shared he was “driven back to the treatment center … in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician” right after the scene wrapped.The late star also said that Season 9 was the only season of the show he was fully sober for.As he recounted in his book, Perry went to rehab 15 times and had undergone 14 surgeries to try and mitigate the damage done to his stomach lining due to alcohol and opioid use.

He also estimated that he spent around $9 million trying to get sober.In October 2023, the “17 Again” star was found dead in his hot tub at age 54 after a ketamine overdose.Kauffman, 67, told The Times U.K.