Friends co-star thanks Matthew Perry for helping him get sober
The voice of bartender Moe and Chief Wiggumin The Simpsons has thanked Matthew Perry for helping him get sober.
Hank Azaria and Perry had been friends ever since the duo met in Los Angeles when Azaria was in his early twenties and Perry in his teenage years. Perry died on Saturday aged 54 after an apparent drowning in his hot tub.
Azaria, who also played Apu the shopkeeper, starred with Perry in Friends as Phoebe’s scientist boyfriend David. Perry and Azaria also starred on stage together back in 2003 in a West End version of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
Writing on Instagram, Azaria remembered how Perry was the first person who made him go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
“The night I went into AA, Matthew brought me in,” he said in a video posted on Instagram.
“The whole first year I was sober, we both went to meetings together, and he was such a great… I got to tell him this, as a sober person, he was so caring and giving and wise and he totally helped me get sober.”
When Matthew Perry was 16 and Azaria 21 the duo worked on a pilot of a show called Morning Heggie which was discontinued, but the show formed the basis of their lifelong friendship.
“We were really more like brothers for a long time,” Azaria added. “We drank a lot together. We laughed a lot together. We were there for each other in the early days of our careers.”
“He was, to me, as funny as he was on Friends, and other things too, in person he was just the funniest man ever… A joke here, a joke there, a joke here, a joke there, and then by the end of the night, he’d weave them all together in this like crescendo of hilarity,” he said.
Azaria had read Matthew Perry’s 2022 memoir and commented that “there was so much suffering. I had to pick up and put down that biography like 11 times, it was so painful for me to read.”
“It was really… as his friend who loved him, I knew he must be suffering, but the details of it were just devastating.”
Perry struggled with alcohol and drug addiction throughout his life, and had his first alcoholic drink aged 14. In his memoir he wrote how he can’t remember filming three series of Friends, and at times was taking up to 55 Vicodin pills a day. He went through rehabilitation 15 times.
The actor, who was 54 when he died, set up The Perry House in 2013 in his former residency in Malibu where he allowed addicts to stay and receive the help and care they needed.
He said he wanted to be remembered for how he helped people more than his legacy on Friends.
He wrote in his memoir: “…When I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if Friends were listed far behind the things I did to try to help other people. I know it won’t happen, but it would be nice.”