Matthew Perry was in far worse shape than viewers realized when he appeared alongside his “Friends” castmates for the 2021 HBO Max reunion special, according to family and friends featured in a new Netflix documentary, “The One About Matthew Perry.”
Perry died at age 54 on Oct. 28, 2023, in the hot tub at his California home. An autopsy attributed his death to the acute effects of ketamine and drowning.
The documentary revisits the period before the reunion, when Perry’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, says he had barely appeared in public since 2018 because of his declining health. That year, Perry’s colon ruptured from opioid use, triggering what Bowick describes as “intense sepsis” throughout his body. He spent two weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital, and used a colostomy bag for nine months — details he also wrote about in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and The Big Terrible Thing.”
Bowick says doctors at one point put Perry on an ECMO machine, essentially an artificial lung, as his condition deteriorated. “His fingertips were turning black. There was a possibility that he would lose his fingers,” she says in the documentary.
A Difficult Diagnosis
Learning that opioid use had caused her brother’s digestive system to shut down felt like “a slap in the face,” Bowick says, explaining that “opioids can slow down your digestive track dramatically.” She recalls feeling angry toward him at the time, thinking, “You did this to yourself, man… That was really really really hard.”
Bowick says it was during his long hospital stay that she first thought her brother might not wake up. Even after he returned home, she says, “he was still in really really bad shape. He had a completely open wound in his gut that wasn’t fully and completely healed. He had a colostomy bag. He aged 20 years in three months. He could barely walk.”
Facing the Cameras Again
The 2021 reunion marked Perry’s first major public appearance since that health crisis, and family members say he was anxious about how he would be perceived. “[He] wanted to be like, ‘I’m here. I’m good, everything’s fine,'” Bowick says, adding that the image “was only sort of half-true” at the time of filming.
Actor and friend Kevin Pollak, who also appears in the documentary, says watching Perry during that period was difficult. “It’s tough to watch, because he’s just not himself,” Pollak says, noting that Perry was “struggling with sobriety” and under “a lot of pressure” around the special.
Jeff Strauss, a former “Friends” writer and producer, says in the documentary that Perry seemed aware his appearance wouldn’t meet everyone’s expectations. “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.”
After the reunion aired, viewers took to social media to express concern about Perry’s appearance and health.
The Toll of Addiction
Bowick says her brother felt “relieved” and “tired” once filming wrapped, but was privately grappling with deep fear about his future. “He was kind of at this place of ‘How am I gonna keep going?’ I know he was really scared, I know he was really fighting for his life,” she says.
She adds that part of Perry “did not think it was possible to live a sober life.” Though she says she never gave up hope, Bowick says she eventually came to think of his addiction “as a terminal illness.”
“There’s so much grief family members and friends have to sit with when their loved ones are struggling with substance abuse,” she says.
“The One About Matthew Perry” is now streaming on Netflix.
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