Jennifer Aniston has admitted she “didn’t understand the devastation” that her Friends co-star Matthew Perry felt during his time on the show.
Matthew’s battle with alcoholism and drug addiction is now widely known, but at the time he kept his demons private, even from his friends and co-stars.
“I didn’t understand the level of anxiety and self-torture [that] was put on Matthew Perry if he didn’t get that laugh, and the devastation that he felt. Which makes a lot of sense,” Jennifer told Today.
Matthew checked into rehab twice during his time on the show. He has long battled substance abuse issues, including vicodin and alcohol, and once claimed he has no recollection of at least three years of filming the hit 90s comedy Friends.
During the recent reunion he shared that he would sweat and “go into convulsions” if the audience didn’t laugh. The cast were shocked and Lisa Kudrow replied: “You didn’t tell us that then.”
“Eventually things got so bad I couldn’t hide it and everybody knew,” Matthew revealed in 2016. “I was a hopelessly narcissistic guy, and I only thought about myself, and then that just shifted, and when that happened, I got some true happiness and comfort in my life.”
Matthew recently ended his engagement to 29-year-old fiance Molly Hurwitz. The 51-year-old confirmed their split in a statement which read: “Sometimes things just don’t work out and this is one of them. I wish Molly the best.”
Molly, a literary manager, and Matthew met in 2018 and became engaged in November 2020. At the time the actor shared the news by joking: “I decided to get engaged. Luckily, I happened to be dating the greatest woman on the face of the planet at this time.”
The decision to end their romance comes a week after it was claimed that Molly had “put their wedding on hold” after he “flirted with other women on a dating app during their break.”
