Friends star Matthew Perry talking about his “very close relationship” with God helping him through his addiction recovery has gone viral after the beloved actor was found dead on Saturday at the age of 54.
“I believe there is a higher power. I believe I have a very close relationship with him that’s helped me a lot,” Perry told Bill Maher last year, while promoting his memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing” on an episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
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Elsewhere in the interview, Perry detailed “a horrible accident” he had nearly a decade ago, when doctors were able to save him with a “Hail Mary” procedure.
“I had a horrible accident about seven years ago,” the 17 Again star said. “I was given a two percent chance to survive the night. They didn’t tell me that, obviously, because I wasn’t really there, but they told my family, and I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine.”
“They call that a ‘Hail Mary.’ That’s what they do when they put you on an ECMO machine,” Perry added. “Five people were on ECMO that night, and the other four died, and I somehow made it.”
Maher then told the actor that “God” must “a fan” of his, to which Perry said, “Yeah, I mean, I know your feeling about that. I know that once you referred to it as a ‘force.’ And I believe that.”
“Somebody’s on your side,” Maher said. “Everybody’s on your side. Everybody’s glad you’re here.”
Perry said that he “never wanted to die, but the real thing for me, and the troubles that I’ve had is that reality is an acquired taste.”
“I have had a great deal of time, a great deal of problems acquiring it,” the Fools Rush In star continued, adding that he felt “really safe” and “really strong” in his sobriety.
“Some of the things that I went through to get that many pills a day, you know, my whole life was math,” Perry said.
The Whole Nine Yards star went on to explain the types of things he would do to acquire drugs:
I would look in the paper and look at open houses on Sundays, and I would go, and I would go upstairs to the medicine room, and if it was an elderly couple I knew I’d hit it home. And then you look at the dates, and if the dates are old and there’s still a lot of pills, you can take a lot of them.
“It’s a horror story, and I’m telling it in kind of a funny way, but as I drove off, I was like, nobody’s gonna say, ‘Chandler just stole drugs out of my medicine cabinet,’” Perry quipped.
While dealing with his substance abuse, Perry decided to pursue acting because he thought being famous might be the answer to his problems, according to a report by CBC.
The first time Perry prayed, he said, “Please, God, make me famous. You can do anything you want to me; just make me famous,” the actor told reporter Tom Power last year.
“Three weeks later, I got Friends,” Perry added. “And God did not forget about the second part.”
Perry was found dead in a jacuzzi at his Los Angeles home on Saturday, with initial reports speculating that he may have died drowned.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office said that Perry’s cause of death report has been “deferred,” which typically means that an autopsy has been completed, but the examiner needs more time and additional investigation into the death.
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