Matthew Perry boards private jet with mystery brunette woman – amid his explosive memoir

Matthew Perry was seen boarding a private jet with a mystery brunette woman in LA on Thursday – ahead of the upcoming release of his explosive memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.

The Chandler Bing actor, 53, who has detailed his past addiction battles, near death experiences and turbulent love life in the tome, looked relaxed as he arrived at the airport with his companion.

The identity of Perry’s companion is unknown. He has recently revealed he has a ‘sober companion’ as well as ‘a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe’.

Dailymail.com has contacted representatives for Matthew Perry for comment. 

Perry wore a green polo, black Batman joggers and white trainers, teamed with spectacles as he made his way onto the plane.

His companion wore a white top and jeans as she was seen exiting a car behind him and boarding the jet. 

The Friends actor has detailed his 15 rehab stints, alcoholism, opioid addiction and weeks in a coma in Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing – due for release on November 1.

He detailed how his drug and alcohol addictions left him with a 2% survival after the opioids caused his colon to burst and left him in a two-week coma. 

The TV star is set to sit down with ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer for an exclusive broadcast interview, airing Friday, October 28 at 8 pm EST on ABC; It will be available the following day on Hulu. 

Mathew’s drug addiction revelation was revealed on Thursday during his interview with People Magazine, while he was speaking about his upcoming memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.   

The actor, who is best known for playing Chandler Bing on Friends, is now sober.

During his interview, he spoke about his decades long battle to rid himself of the disease of addiction.

Matthew had revealed that he to have 14 surgeries on his stomach and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months;  he said his stomach has a number of scars from the multiple surgeries.

His therapist told him he may have to use a colostomy bag for the rest of his life if he takes drugs again, something that keeps him from relapsing.

The actor did not disclose when he got sober but said he is ‘pretty healthy’ now and choose to ‘count each day.’   

The actor also said he had to go to rehab 15 times in a bid to get clean; his first bout was in 1997 and then again in 2001 and in 2011.

During his interview, ‘The doctors told my family that I had a two percent chance to live. I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that.’

Adding: ‘I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again.’  

‘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,’ Matthew said.

The actor said his alcohol addiction began when he was 24 while starring on Friends, adding that he was ‘entrenched in a lot of trouble’ by age 34.

Mathew revealed that at one time he was taking 55 Vicodin a day while on Friends, noting that he was down to 128 pounds but ‘didn’t know how to stop.’

He said that his co-stars on Friends ‘were understanding’ and ‘patient.’ 

During season nine, Matthew was sober; that was the year he also was nominated for Best Actor. 

He recently  revealed he used to attend open houses with the intent of stealing pills in his efforts to fuel his 55 Vicodin-a-day addiction.

In a new Diane Sawyer/ABC News interview shedding more light on his harrowing battle with addiction, Perry said he doesn’t believe anyone would have suspected Chandler Bing, his sweet character from Friends, as the thief.

‘On Sundays, I would go to open houses and go to the bathrooms in the open house and see what pills they had in there and steal them. And I think they thought “Well, there’s no way that Chandler came in and stole from us.”

Perry called his open house strategy the ‘weirdest thing’ he did in his efforts to get his 55 pills.

The actor, who said he knew he needed that amount of Vicodin or else he’d get ‘really sick’, said he also complained of fake migraines in order to get the prescription medication.

‘I did all sorts of things – a bunch of doctors, fake migraines and all that stuff,’ he explained. 

According to ABC, Perry says he has been in detox approximately 65 times. 

A sneak peek for the upcoming interview also sees Perry recall going into a coma and escaping ‘death really narrowly.’  

In a snippet obtained by Page Six, the actor spoke out about how his addiction to opioids and alcohol affected the way he looked on screen, and revealed how those watching the NBC comedy series can figure out how severe his drug use was based off his weight and beard length.

‘You can track the trajectory for my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,’ he wrote in the book.

He has also reflected on the challenges of having to use a colostomy bag while recovering from his colon bursting due to opioid overdose, at age 49, in 2018.

After suffering from a gastrointestinal perforation, the actor recently revealed he had to use a colostomy bag for nine months and was given just a two per cent chance of survival after spending two weeks in a coma on life support.  

In a new interview with GQ, the Friends alum provided a snippet from his upcoming memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, in which he recalls waking up ‘covered in’ his own feces 50 to 60 times.  

During his five-month hospital stay following his colon rupturing, he told the outlet that he he would regularly wake up and find his colostomy bag had ‘broken again.’

‘I had sh** all over my face, all over my body, in the bed next door. When it breaks, it breaks. You have to get nurses,’ he detailed. 

To his horror when the time came to remove his colostomy bag, the operation didn’t initially work and it was replaced with an ileostomy bag. 

‘Ten times worse. You have to deal with an ileostomy bag 18, 19 times a day. A lot of suicides with an ileostomy bag. People can’t take it,’ he said. 

Soon afterward, however, he underwent surgery and that ‘fixed things,’ according to the performer, who has since ‘lived without’ a colostomy bag for ‘along time.’ 

‘I’m very grateful,’ Perry stated, despite adjusting to how his body looks with ‘plenty of scars.’ 

‘I look at them with gratitude, because it helped me stay alive. But I have to live my life 24/7 with all of this scar tissue I’m constantly aware of. It feels like I’m doing a sit-up at full stretch all the time,’ he explained.

Still, upon first taking his shirt off after his hospital stay, Perry admitted to bursting ‘into tears’ and being ‘disturbed’ as he feared thought his ‘life was over.’

To feel better, about 30 minutes later, Perry confesses to calling his drug dealer. 

This led to him to try and sober at another rehab center, this time in Switzerland, where he nearly died again after his heart stopped for a full five minutes. 

‘This huge, strong guy leaped on top of me,’ Perry said, ‘and did CPR, and broke eight of my ribs and saved my life.’ 

As he continues to put his recovery first, Perry has declined to reveal how long he has been sober, but says ‘it’s been a little while’ since he’s relapsed.  

‘I’m less ruled by fear now. One of the things I learned is I can handle when bad things happen now. I’m resilient, I am strong, and those things should come very clearly to the reader in the book as well. I am a strong man and I never gave myself credit for that, ever. But now I’m slowly starting to,’ he noted.

During an interview with People this month, he said he was sharing his story now that he’s ‘pretty safely sober — and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction’ and to ‘help people.’ 

Talking about his starring role on Friends at aged 24, his alcohol addiction was starting to surface.

He said he could handle it but he was ‘entrenched in a lot of trouble’ by the time he was 34. He said there were years during that time in which he was sober and in fact, he was sober throughout the whole of season nine, the year he got nominated for Best Actor. 

At one point during his Friends career, he admits he was taking 55 Vicodin a day and was down to 128 pounds but yet he ‘didn’t know how to stop.’ 

He said the disease has got worse and worse and progressive and he’s got older and noted his Friends cast mates ‘were understanding, and they were patient.’

A constant battle, Matthew says: ‘I’m pretty healthy now’. He is choosing not to say how long he has been sober for but is ‘counting each day.’ 

He said his therapist has told him that he may have to have a colostomy bag for the rest of his life if he takes drugs again, which helps him to avoid relapsing. 

The actor, who checked himself into rehab during his time on Friends once in 1997 and again in 2001.

Matthew famously told the New York Times in 2002, one year after getting sober: ‘When [fame] happens, it’s kind of like Disneyland for a while. 

‘For me it lasted about eight months, this feeling of “I’ve made it, I’m thrilled, there’s no problem in the world”. 

He told the Hollywood Reporter in 2015: ‘I’ve had a lot of ups and downs in my life. I learned a lot from my failures.

‘But the best thing about me is that if an alcoholic comes up to me and says, “Will you help me stop drinking?” I will say, “Yes, I know how to do that.”‘ 

‘And then you realise that it doesn’t accomplish anything, it’s certainly not filling any holes in your life. I didn’t get sober because I felt like it. I got sober because I was worried I was going to die the next day.’

‘It’s no accident that Chandler is a guy who is trying to deter his own human emotional feelings with laughter. That’s what I did for years. I’ve tried to palm myself off as being a jokester, kind of like hanging out with me is kind of like a vacation. But that could only take me so far.’

He did his third stint in rehab in May 2011, when a representative for the star said it was to prevent a relapse.

The actor became an international sensation practically over night after he landed the role as Chandler Bing in Friends in 1994.

But while he came off as the hilarious and heartwarming guy who always had a smile on his face on the screen, behind-the-scenes, the star was facing a downward spiral of drug addiction, alcohol use, and overdoses that left him with just a two per cent chance of survival.

Perry told People magazine recently while discussing his book that he turned to drugs to deal with the immense fame and pressure that came with starring in one of the most popular shows of all time – revealing he needed 14 surgeries on his stomach and has been in rehab 15 different times as a result of his drug and alcohol use.

In 1997, Perry got into a jet ski accident and was prescribed Vicodin, a powerful and addictive pain medication – which would eventually turn into in a years-long battle with addiction.

The comedian admitted to the outlet that during the height of his career, he was taking 55 pain killers per day and dropped down to only 128 pounds. 

He played Chandler from 1994 to 2004 on Friends alongside co-stars David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow.

The show aired for 10 seasons and made the stars household names. 

They reunited in 2021 – the first time after 17 years since the show ended – for a reunion special.