Matthew Perry reveals his heart stopped beating for five minutes: Doctor ‘broke eight of my ribs’ doing CPR
Matthew Perry pulled out of Don’t look Up after his heart stopped for five minutes.
The Friends star was supposed to appear in Adam McKay’s Netflix hit when a medical emergency precluded him from doing so.
As reported by Rolling Stone, Perry, 53, was set to play a Republican journalist in the film and had even shot a scene with Jonah Hill when he was forced to exit over his health.
In his forthcoming memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry wrote that the film – which would have seen him share scenes with Oscar-winner Meryl Streep – would have been the “biggest movie I’d gotten ever”.
Perry was in rehab at the time of filming. When the actor went to the rehab centre in Switzerland, he lied to his doctors about having severe stomach pain in order to get prescribed hydrocodone, an opioid used to treat pain and as a cough suppressant.
“In fact, I was ok,” he wrote. “It still felt like I was constantly doing a sit-up, so it was very uncomfortable, but it wasn’t pain.”
In order to alleviate his discomfort, the doctors wanted Perry to undergo surgery to “put some kind of weird medical device in my back”.
The actor took hydrocodone the night before his surgery. When he was administered propofol, an anaesthesia drug, during the procedure, a combination of the two medications stopped his heart.
Perry wrote: “I was given the shot at 11am. I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes.”
He continued: “It wasn’t a heart attack – I didn’t flatline – but nothing had been beating. 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?”
Perry said he broke eight ribs due to the strenuous CPR.
The actor said that he was in too much pain after the incident to continue filming Don’t Look Up, calling the decision to exit the project “heartbreaking”.
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