Matthew Perry Exited Don't Look Up After His Heart Stopped: 'Biggest Movie I'd Gotten Ever'

Matthew Perry revealed in his new memoir that he was set to appear in the 2021 film Don't Look Up until a medical scare forced him to pull out of the movie.

The Friends star, 53, reveals in his new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, that he was to star opposite Meryl Streep's President Orlean in three scenes of the Adam McKay–directed movie before his heart stopped during a stay at a treatment center in Switzerland.

Perry writes that the Oscar-nominated Don't Look Up would have been the "biggest movie I'd gotten ever," according to an excerpt published by Rolling Stone.

The actor adds in the memoir that he was on 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone while he filmed a group scene with Jonah Hill that did not make the film's final cut.

Perry never got to film with Streep after he was given propofol for anesthesia in advance of a surgery to "put some kind of weird medical device in my back."

"I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m.," Perry writes in the memoir, according to Rolling Stone. "I woke up 11 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."

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"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," Perry writes. "If I hadn't been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?"

Perry said in the memoir that while the doctor "may have saved my life," he broke eight of his ribs while giving him CPR. The actor writes that the decision to exit Don't Look Up was "heartbreaking," but that he was in too much pain in the aftermath of the incident to continue filming.

Perry recently opened up to PEOPLE about his addiction journey and the new memoir and said he wanted to wait to share his story "when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again."

"I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober — and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction — to write it all down," Perry said. "And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people."

Mike Pont/WireImage

Perry opens his memoir with the revelation that he almost died a few years ago at age 49.

Publicly acknowledging at the time that he suffered from a gastrointestinal perforation, the actor had actually spent weeks fighting for his life after his colon burst from opioid overuse. He spent two weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.

When he was first admitted to the hospital, "the doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live," he recalls. "I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that's called a Hail Mary. No one survives that."

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is out Nov. 1.