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The spike in interest in all things related to Matthew Perry includes a nearly five-minute excerpt of an interview with Bill Maher where the deceased actor talks about a near-death experience, his belief in God and the "math" that was involved to feed his drug habit.
"I believe there is a higher power. I believe I have a very close relationship with him that's helped me a lot," Perry said on Real Time with Bill Maher in November 2022 while promoting his book, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
"A lot of people did have you in the 'dead pool.' Maybe you," Maher tells Perry in the five-minute clip, which Newsweek has embedded in this story.
That's when Perry launches into a story about nearly dying seven years earlier after an accident he doesn't describe in the clip.
"I was given a 2 percent chance to survive the night," he says. "I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine. They call that a 'Hail Mary'."
ECMO, which stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, is a process used when the lungs and heart aren't functioning properly. It pumps blood out, adds oxygen and removes carbon dioxide, then pumps the blood back into the body.
"Five people were on ECMO that night, and the other four died, and I somehow made it," Perry explains.
"Well, God is a fan," says Maher, who has frequently said that he's nearly sure God does not exist.
"I know your feeling about that," Perry says, eliciting laughter from the audience.
Maher calls Perry "resilient" and says "it's so easy to die." Perry says he never tried to die, but he knew that he had done so many drugs that it could have killed him.
The 54-year-old actor best known for his role as Chandler Bing on Friends was found unresponsive at his Los Angeles home on Saturday. The following day, the coroner's office said the cause of death had been "deferred," which usually means an autopsy was completed but more investigation is needed to accurately determine a cause of death.
During his chat with Maher, he said he is "strong" in his sobriety, before recalling the problems he had in acquiring recreational drugs.
"Some of the things that I went through to get that many pills a day, you know, my whole life was math," Perry told Maher.
Perry said he'd scour the news for announcements of open houses, then go to the for-sale homes and take drugs from the medicine cabinets.
"It's a horror story, and I'm telling it in kind of a funny way, but as I drove off, I was like, nobody's gonna say, 'Chandler just stole drugs out of my medicine cabinet'," Perry joked.
The renewed interest in the deceased actor also includes a spike in streams for the theme song to Friends as well as sales of his book. The hardcover version of the latter, published one year ago, shot to the top of Amazon's list of bestselling memoirs on Tuesday.
About the writer
Paul Bond has been a journalist for three decades. Prior to joining Newsweek he was with The Hollywood Reporter. He ... Read more