Washington [US]: ‘Friends’ star Mathew Perry, who played the role of Chandler Bing on the superhit sitcom, has recalled the moment he had to drop out of Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep starrer ‘Don’t Look Up’ due to a medical scare that “stopped” his heart for five minutes.
According to Fox News, in his memoir ‘Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing’, Perry tells about being in a Switzerland rehabilitation facility while ‘Don’t Look Up’ was being filmed. His memoir states that the actor lied to doctors about severe stomach pain so he would be prescribed hydrocodone.
“In fact, I was OK. It still felt like I was constantly doing a sit-up — so it was very uncomfortable — but it wasn’t pain,” Perry wrote, as per the Rolling Stone, reported Fox News.
The doctors felt that a “medical device” in his back, requiring surgery, would best help relieve the actor’s pain, Perry said.
According to Perry, he took hydrocodone the night before the surgery and was given propofol for anaesthesia during the surgery. This combination is what stopped his heart.
“I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m. I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart for five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating,” Perry wrote, according to the outlet.
He added, “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. If I hadn’t been on ‘Friends,’ would he have stopped at three minutes? Did ‘Friends’ save my life again? He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight of my ribs.”
The actor noted that he was in too much pain following the incident to return to the ‘Don’t Look Up’ set. He wrote that this decision was “heartbreaking.”
As per Fox News, the outlet reported that before the health scare Perry was set to play a role as a republican journalist in Adam McKay’s Netflix movie. Reportedly, he even shot a scene with Jonah Hill though it didn’t make it into the final cut.
