“My heart stopped for 5 minutes”: Matthew Perry Had to Say No to Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Movie After an Unfortunate Health Scare
Actor Matthew Perry gained recognition as Chandler Bing from the NBC sitcom Friends. After the program, he starred in several other films for which he received positive reviews, but none of them could match the character he played on the show.
Last November in his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir, Perry chose to go into detail about his struggles in life and provide the public with a previously unheard-of look into his life. The actor revealed in his autobiography that he had to withdraw from a film starring Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio because of a health risk. Now let’s learn more.
Matthew Perry recalls how being on Friends saved his life
Friends actor Matthew Perry, in his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir mentioned that he was a part of Netflix’s Don’t Look Up starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, etc., but he had to drop out of the movie after his heart stopped for five minutes.
He explained that he was in rehab in Switzerland when the filming for the movie had started and he decided to lie to his doctor at the time and told them that he had severe stomach pain to get a hydrocodone prescription and was scheduled for surgery to put some medical device on his back.
The actor noted that during the procedure, the propofol, which is an anesthesia drug, interacted with the hydrocodone he had taken the night before, which stopped his heart for a significant amount of time.
“I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m. I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating.”
Perry further wrote according to Rolling Stone,
“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?”
He mentioned that the doctor did save his life but ended up breaking his eight ribs.
Matthew Perry said the decision to drop out of Don’t Look Up was heartbreaking
The actor said in his memoir that he was in too much to return to the set to start filming, which is why he decided to drop out of Don’t Look Up, in which he was set to play the role of a republican journalist.
Perry had shot a few scenes with Jonah Hill but it did not make it to the movie and he noted that Don’t Look Up was the biggest movie he’d ever gotten and the decision was heartbreaking because he had scenes with Meryl Streep.
The actor unfortunately passed away at the age of 54 on October 28th.
