Matthew Perry Exited ‘Don’t Look Up’ After His Heart Stopped for Five Minutes: Doctor ‘Broke Eight of My Ribs’ Doing CPR

Zack Sharf
·2 min read
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Matthew Perry reveals in his upcoming memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” that he had to pull out of Adam McKay’s star-studded Netflix comedy “Don’t Look Up” after a medical scare in which his heart stopped for five minutes (via Rolling Stone). The actor was at a rehab center in Switzerland at the time. He writes that a combination of hydrocodone and propofol stopped his heart.

According to Rolling Stone, Perry was set to play a Republican journalist in “Don’t Look Up” and even shot a scene with Jonah Hill. The actor writes in his memoir that “Don’t Look Up” would have been the “biggest movie I’d gotten ever.” He was even set to share scenes with Meryl Streep. During filming, Perry was already taking hydrocodone.

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When Perry went to the rehab center, he lied to his doctors about having severe stomach pain in order to get prescribed hydrocodone. “In fact, I was ok,” he writes. “It still felt like I was constantly doing a sit-up — so it was very uncomfortable — but it wasn’t pain.”

To help with his pain, the doctors decided to have Perry undergo surgery to “put some kind of weird medical device in my back.” The actor took hydrocodone the night before his surgery and was then administered the anesthesia drug propofol during the surgery, the combination of which stopped his heart.

“I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m.,” Perry writes. “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. 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,” Perry adds.

Perry concludes by writing that he was in too much pain after the medical incident to return to the “Don’t Look Up” set. He says the decision to exit the movie was “heartbreaking.” The one scene Perry did shoot for the movie did not make it into the movie’s theatrical release.

“Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” is now available for pre-order and releases on Nov. 1. Perry has been promoting the book for the last couple weeks, revealing that he spent around $9 million on his sobriety over the years.

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