Matthew Perry details immense pressure he felt to make 'Friends' studio audience laugh

By Megan Armstrong | Last updated 5/28/21

You could always count on Chandler Bing for a laugh at least once per episode of Friends, but Matthew Perry wasn't always confident that he could deliver.

"I felt like I was gonna die if they didn't laugh," Perry disclosed during Friends: The Reunion, referencing the studio audience when taping Friends. "And it's not healthy, for sure. But I would sometimes say a line, and they wouldn't laugh, and I would sweat and just, like, go into compulsions. If I didn't get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out."

"You didn't tell us that," Lisa Kudrow said, surprised.

"No?" Perry asked.

"No," Kudrow said. "I don't remember you ever saying that."

"Oh, yeah," Perry asserted. "I felt like that every single night."

Previously, back in 2016, Perry admitted that he doesn't remember three years of his Friends run—"I was a little out of it at the time"—due to this substance abuse issues at the time:

The 51-year-old actor was struggling with an addiction to Vicodin, which was explored in this 2002 People cover story. Here's a telling excerpt:

"I’ve been through a very dark time," he says of his four-year struggle with drug and alcohol abuse, including two stints in rehab in 1997 and 2001 and a 2000 hospitalization for alcohol-related pancreatitis. Hooked on the painkiller Vicodin, Perry says early on he was downing an “insane number of pills”—between 20 and 30 daily—and later drinking “probably a quart of vodka a day.” Combined with his '00 car crash and fluctuating weight, he was clearly a Friend in need. “It was terrifying,” says Friends executive producer Marta Kauffman, “watching someone you care about in so much pain.”

Perry's Vicodin problem stemmed from a jet ski accident in 2000.

Friends ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004.

The six Friends—Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer—had not been back to Stage 24, where the iconic sitcom was filmed, since the series finale 17 years ago, but they gathered there for Friends: The Reunion.