Matthew Perry, the actor who earned a million dollars per episode of Friends while fighting his drug addiction

Friends gave absolute success and worldwide popularity to Matthew Perry, died this Saturday in the jacuzzi of his home in Los Angeles at the age of 54. Those years of glory in his professional life (1994-2004) coincided with a real personal hell for the actor, because at that time he was fighting his addictions to drugs and alcohol.

The actor tells it in his memoirs, ‘Friends, lovers and that terrible thing‘, where he also explains that the consequences of those addictions were visible in the episodes of the series – he continually gained and lost weight – in such a way that he refused to watch the series since then. “He was taking 55 Vicodin a day, weighed 128 pounds, was in ‘Friends‘ being watched by 30 million people, and that’s why I can’t watch the show. I could go drinking, take opiates, drink, cocaine. I noticed season by season by how I looked. That’s why I don’t want to see it, because that’s what I see.”

In any case, Perry assured that he never took drugs or alcohol while filming Friends. “I had a rule that I would never drink or do drugs while working. Because I had too much respect for the five people I worked with. So, I never got drunk while working,” although “one day I came to the set with a big hangover.” .

The highest paid actors on television

The brutal success that the series achieved Friends In its ten seasons (available on HBO Max) it made its actors the highest paid on television thanks to the agreement that Matthew Perry and his colleagues jointly negotiated. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc y David Schwimmer.

They began charging $25,000 for each episode in its first two seasons, although Cox’s cache was greater because he was more popular than the others when the series started. But they soon discovered that the series depended only on them and that their power would be infinite if they negotiated together with Warner Bros. The idea occurred to Schwimmer and little by little his salaries rose to $75,000 per episode in the third season, 85,000 in the fourth, 100,000 in the fifth and 125,000 in the sixth. They claim that they took $750,000 for each installment of seasons 7 and 8, and reached $1 million per episode in seasons 9 and 10.

A few years ago they got together to star in a special Friends in which they remembered their best moments in the series. Each would have pocketed $2.5 million for that meeting. Furthermore, various media assure that the protagonists of Friends They continue to take 2% of the important profits that the NBC series continues to generate.