Popular "Friends" star Matthew Perry, who died at the age of 54 on Saturday, is not only going viral because of his tragic early passing, but also because of comments he made during an appearance on liberal talk show host Bill Maher's "Real Time with Bill Maher" to talk about his memoir "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing." During a portion of the episode, Perry discussed his relationship with God and how much he was enjoying it, noting how a higher power is what got him through his addiction and helped him become sober.
Man, this is the sort of thing you love to hear, but at the same time feel horrible about because Perry is no longer with us, which means that all the things he could have accomplished in his sober state will go undone. It's so cool to hear he was acknowledging his Creator. You can only hope it was a real faith grounded in truth. We can't know for sure, of course. Regardless, people are sharing the comments as a way to commemorate Perry.
“I believe there is a higher power. I believe I have a very close relationship with him that’s helped me a lot,” the "Friends" actor said during his interview on the show.
In another part of the interview with Maher, Perry provided details concerning a "horrible accident" he had almost ten years ago, revealing doctors managed to save his life by using a "Hail Mary" procedure.
“I had a horrible accident about seven years ago,” the actor said. “I was given a two percent chance to survive the night. They didn’t tell me that, obviously, because I wasn’t really there, but they told my family, and I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine.”
“They call that a ‘Hail Mary.’ That’s what they do when they put you on an ECMO machine,” Perry recounted. “Five people were on ECMO that night, and the other four died, and I somehow made it.”
Maher responded to the story by saying that God must be a big fan of Perry's work, prompting the actor to reply, “Yeah, I mean, I know your feeling about that. I know that once you referred to it as a ‘force.’ And I believe that.”
“Somebody’s on your side,” Maher added. “Everybody’s on your side. Everybody’s glad you’re here.”
Perry noted that he “never wanted to die, but the real thing for me, and the troubles that I’ve had is that reality is an acquired taste.”
“I have had a great deal of time, a great deal of problems acquiring it,” he admitted on the program.
“Some of the things that I went through to get that many pills a day, you know, my whole life was math,” the actor said.
"I would look in the paper and look at open houses on Sundays, and I would go, and I would go upstairs to the medicine room, and if it was an elderly couple, I knew I’d hit it home. And then you look at the dates, and if the dates are old and there’s still a lot of pills, you can take a lot of them," Perry detailed as he described how he came to possess so many pills.
“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 actor was found dead by emergency responders who answered a call to his Los Angeles home concerning a potential cardiac arrest. He was discovered dead in his jacuzzi. The full cause of death is being "deferred," which means authorities need additional time to investigate what may have led to the actor's demise.
Pray for his family and friends.
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