Matthew Perry thought it was “devastating” when Jennifer Aniston confronted him about his drinking while working on “Friends.”
Aniston, who portrayed Rachel Green on the hit NBC series, approached her late co-star “in a kind of weird but loving way”: “’I know you’re drinking,’ she said,” he wrote in his memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.”
“‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he wrote, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.”
The “Fools Rush In” star also said the “Cake” actress confronting him made it particularly potent as he had just “gotten over her” in light of her then-budding romance with Brad Pitt.
“‘I know I’m drinking too much,’ I said, ‘but I don’t exactly know what to do about it,'” he recalled telling Aniston at the time.
Perry, who died on Saturday, Oct. 28, revealed in his tome that he spent around $9 million trying to get sober. By the time he filmed the “Friends” reunion for Max, he had been clean of all substances for 18 months.
The Los Angeles County medical examiner completed Perry’s autopsy the following day, but his cause of death was ruled as deferred pending toxicology reports.
Perry’s family and friends gathered at Forest Lawn Memorial Park for the “Whole Nine Yards” star’s funeral last Friday, where Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer were all pictured arriving in all-black ensembles.
Insiders later told Pvnew exclusively that Aniston, 54, was struggling the most with Perry’s unexpected death.
“It’s a second massive loss in less than a year, with the one-year anniversary of her dad’s death just around the corner,” a source shared.
“She still hasn’t fully regained her footing from that, and now this has just completely knocked her off her feet.”
The source added that Aniston is trying to “regroup and recover,” but the emotional toll the deaths have taken has been a “completely devastating blow.”
