Matthew Perry opens up about battles with booze, drugs

TORONTO — Former Friends star Matthew Perry, who grew up in Canada’s capital, has opened up about his battles with addiction.

“I had a big problem with alcohol and pills and I couldn’t stop,” Perry told People. “Eventually things got so bad that I couldn’t hide it.”

Perry, 43, appears on the cover of this week’s issue with the headline: “My Life As An Addict.”

Perry was born in Massachusetts but moved to Ottawa as an infant with his mother Suzanne, a Canadian journalist and former press secretary to prime minister Pierre Trudeau. His stepfather is Saskatchewan-born broadcast journalist Keith Morrison.

Perry moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career and landed the part of Chandler Bing on Friends when he was 24.

“I was in the white-hot flame of fame,” he said. “The six of us were just everywhere all the time. From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem like I had it all. It was actually a very lonely time for me because I was suffering from alcoholism.”

Perry told People he often showed up on the set of the hit sitcom “painfully hungover.”

The actor also talked about getting hooked on the painkiller Vicodin after a jet-ski accident in 1997. “I felt better than I ever felt in my entire life,” he recalled.

Perry had two stints in rehab during the run of Friends.

“Something clicked,” he said. “You have to want the help.”

Perry, who recently starred on the short-lived series Go On, now spends a lot of his time helping addicts. He turned his former Malibu beach house into a sober living facility for men and he has become an outspoken advocate for drug courts that sentence offenders to treatment instead of incarceration.

“The interesting reason that I can be so helpful to people now is that I screwed up so often. It’s nice for people to see that somebody who once struggled in their life is not struggling anymore,” he told the magazine.

“I was a hopelessly narcissistic guy, and I only thought about myself,” the now-sober star added. “Then that just shifted, and when that happened, I got some true happiness and comfort in my life.”