Yes, ‘Friends’ is important to Matthew Perry, but he wants to be remembered for his sobriety and helping other people

Chandler Bing broke Amazon this week.

That’s not an attempt at a “Friends” revival pitch. Matthew Perry’s new memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” crashed Amazon’s servers upon release, according to the actor.

“They got so many orders at the same time that Amazon broke for 20 minutes,” Perry told me in a phone interview.

It’s a meaningful success for the actor, a household name for his performance as the beloved Chandler on NBC’s “Friends.” What’s uncanny about speaking with Perry is perhaps obvious — with his unique cadence, quick wit and dry humour, it really does feel like catching up with Chandler after a long few years apart.

These days, Perry’s feeling good. He’s written an acclaimed memoir and he’s having a new house built in California with a dedicated pickleball court. (He’d recommend the sport to anyone, by the way: “it’s like standing on a ping-pong table!”) And in other good news, Perry no longer has any beef with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The two went to school together as children in Ottawa and Perry’s friends say that, together, they beat up the future politician.

“I don’t personally remember that,” said Perry. “But my friends say we did, so I guess I did and it got out.

“(Trudeau) tweeted me … and he said he wants to have a fight again,” Perry continued. “And I said, ‘You’re now in charge of your own army. I’m not gonna fight you. I’m gonna back off. You know, best of luck, pal, in all your endeavours.’”

But things haven’t always been so breezy for the actor. Perry struggled for decades with a debilitating addiction to drugs and alcohol — his journey toward recovery and self-acceptance constitutes a vast majority of the book. Perry’s battle with substance abuse came to a head during the pandemic when his heart stopped for five minutes due to a lethal combination of hydrocodone and the anesthesia drug propofol, administered to him in advance of surgery.

“I was given the shot at 11 a.m.,” Perry writes in his autobiography. “I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating. I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from ‘Friends’ dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest. If I hadn’t been on ‘Friends,’ would he have stopped at three minutes? Did ‘Friends’ save my life again?”

Perry has made a point of using his experiences as an addict to help others. For him, there’s no other choice.

“I have a lot of experience in my life helping people and … getting them free from the prison of addiction. Sometimes I’ve done it onstage in front of 100,000 people. Sometimes I’ve done it just one on one. You start to get the same juice from it; you get amped up in the same way with just helping one person,” he said in our interview.

“There’s a popular adage that people can’t change. And I’m here to say that is not correct. I see people change every day. And I’m a very good example of people changing.”

While Perry forever holds “Friends” close to his heart, it’s not the most important thing in his life and it’s not the only success he wants to be remembered for. He hasn’t watched the whole show — maybe a total of about a season — but he understands the impact it had on people’s lives around the world. Perry hopes “Friends” can be the connection that helps his story gets into the hands of the people who need to hear it most.

“‘Friends’ was the greatest experience of my life,” he said. “But when I pass away I want people talking about my successes, and helping people through this nasty disease. What I want people to talk about is this … there really isn’t anybody that I can’t help.”

When Perry’s heart stopped, he was put on an ECMO life-support machine, a measure he called the “Hail Mary” of medical interventions. When he survived the night, he knew he needed to make his remaining time on Earth worth it by helping as many people as possible.

“It took a couple of years to figure out exactly how to do it, where I thought, ‘Why don’t I write a book and write my story?’ because that will help a lot of people. So I did. I wrote 140 pages on the notes app in my phone. And then I turned that in and was told it could be a really good book if I kept going, so I did.” Any doubts about the book’s authorship are assuaged within the first few pages. No ghostwriter could believably capture Perry’s intensely funny and candid demeanour.

“It’s definitely me,” said Perry. “So there’s always a comedic thread through it.”

This press tour has been a learning experience for Perry, who for his entire career has been used to barrelling forward with jokes no matter what. On this junket, while he’s still quippy as ever, he’s also been able to be serious when needed.

“That included me actually crying on Diane Sawyer, which was pretty amazing,” he said.

“My sobriety is strong enough now … I feel safe to share this story now with the right people around me when I’m doing it,” he said.

And the story he shares is relentlessly candid, covering everything from his complicated relationship with his parents (his mother was Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary, and his father was the actor featured in the Old Spice commercials of the 1970s and ’80s) to his crush on Jennifer Aniston to his brief romantic involvement with Julia Roberts.

“Before, I was living a fear-driven life. And that entered my relationships with women and that’s what part of the book is about. But I’m not ruled by fear anymore. I’m feeling very confident and strong and resilient. There’s sort of an apology to women for being so fear-driven that I would break up with them just because I was afraid that they would break up with me. But I’m a different guy now,” said Perry.

Just before booking “Friends,” he made a prayer — “a Faustian bargain,” in his words — for God to do whatever he wanted to Perry, but to please make him famous.

“Three weeks later, I got ‘Friends.’ But God didn’t forget about the other part,” Perry said, echoing a line in his book.

“It was a stupid prayer. When I pray, I’m now very careful about the words I use. Because sometimes they come true.”

Perry is now 53 with an estimated net worth of $120 million (U.S.). His auspicious prayer for fame and fortune came true, mostly on a bright orange couch in Central Perk.

But was it worth it?

“I have plans to go back and watch ‘Friends.’ I shied away from it for a long time, because I could see how sick I was at different parts of the show. When I was thin, I knew what pills I was on and, when I was overweight, I knew what I was drinking. That’s sort of all I see.”

“But there was a lot of good work being done. It’s one of the most beloved shows of all time … it’s something to celebrate, that’s for sure.

“I think people can tell that I’m taking this very seriously,” continued Perry. “They’re listening and really responding.

“This, and the sobriety and helping others, all that stuff. That should be number one on the list of things I did. And maybe ‘Friends’ a little bit lower.”