NEWSMatthew Perry Exited 'Don't Look Up' After His Heart Stopped For 5 Minutes During Surgery
Matthew Perry was originally supposed to star in Netflix's Don't Look Up — but a terrifying health scare prevented him from doing so. In the actor's soon-to-be released memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry revealed that while undergoing a procedure, his heart stopped for five minutes, in turn making him drop out of the project.
In the tome, the Friends lead explained that during a rehab stay, he embellished on the stomach pain he was having in order to receive extra medication, but it wound up having a terrible effect on him as he underwent surgery for his discomfort.
“I was given the shot at eleven a.m.,” Perry explained in the book. “I woke up 11 hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes.” Medical professionals ended up breaking eight of his ribs trying to resuscitate him.
The scary event took place in the midst of filming the blockbuster movie in Boston, where he was set to portray a Republican journalist who had many scenes with Meryl Streep.
"It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating," Perry penned. "I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest. If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?"
Despite the film being what he called the “biggest movie I’d gotten ever,” Perry made the “heartbreaking” decision to leave the project due to the pain and aftermath.
As OK! previously reported, Perry said it was his near death experiences that prompted him to completely cut drugs out of his life. "My therapist said, 'The next time you think about taking OxyContin, just think about having a colostomy bag for the rest of your life,'" the actor shared in a recent interview. "And a little window opened, and I crawled through it, and I no longer want OxyContin."
"I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again," Perry continued. "I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober, and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction to write it all down. And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people."
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Rolling Stone obtained the excerpts from Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
