Matthew Perry was supposed to be in Don’t Look Up, but his heart stopped for 5 minutes
It was the “biggest movie” Perry ever got, and he had to drop out due to the medical scare
In Friends star Matthew Perry’s new memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, he’s revealing the depths to which substance abuse and addiction endangered his life and damaged his career. Those problems continued throughout 2020 when he was set to appear in the “biggest movie I’d gotten ever,” Adam McKay’s star-studded comedy Don’t Look Up. Unfortunately, Perry never got the opportunity to shoot his scenes because his heart had stopped for five minutes.
The actor was to play a Republican journalist for three scenes in McKay’s comedy, which would have Perry opposite Meryl Streep, Perry flew to Boston to film. The production was filmed there from November 2020 to February 2021.
Perry had long dealt with substance abuse, having started drinking at age 14. But an injury on the set of Fools Rush In, a romantic comedy he starred in with Salma Hayek, led him to opioid addiction. Over the years, Perry says that he spent upwards of $9 million on rehab and sobriety efforts.
Around the time he started working on Don’t Look Up, he was on 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone, a pain medication prescribed to him by a rehab facility in Switzerland. While there, he told doctors that he suffered from severe stomach pains. “In fact, I was OK,” Perry writes. “It still felt like I was constantly doing a sit-up — so it was very uncomfortable — but it wasn’t pain.” He received the hydrocodone, but doctors wanted to do surgery to “put some kind of weird medical device in my back.”