Matthew Perry has revealed that a major health scare forced him to drop out of acting opposite Meryl Streep in Adam McKay’s star-studded, world-ending satire Don’t Look Up, after his heart ‘stopped beating for five minutes’.
He has now acknowledged it as ‘the biggest movie I’ve ever gotten’ and would have marked his return to the big screen for the first time since 2009’s comedy 17 Again with Zac Efron.
The Friends star was first reported to be a member of the sprawling cast in October 2020, and even confirmed his involvement in a rare series of excited tweets that same month.
When it was released, fans were anticipating him making some sort of appearance, especially following a picture of him on set filming in Boston, Massachusetts being released in December 2020.
It showed his character – understood to be a Republican journalist – stood next to a Kid Rock lookalike and dressed warmly in a suit, black overcoat, grey scarf and leather gloves for a political rally scene.
However, it sadly didn’t make it into the final cut of the movie, and Matthew has now shone a light on what happened.
‘But I don’t want you guys to worry about it. I know some people. We’ll figure this thing out. #Couldnotbemoreexcited’
According to his newly-published memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big, Terrible Thing, via Variety, Matthew over-emphasised the pain he was in with his stomach while at rehab in Switzerland to get prescribed painkillers.
It was the combination of those the night before and the propofol before surgery that stopped his heart.
‘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,’ he wrote in his book.
‘If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?’
He then said he was in too much physical pain to return to the set of Don’t Look Up, and made the ‘heartbreaking’ decision to exit the film.
Don’t Look Up is available to stream on Netflix now.
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