‘Friends’ creators asked Matthew Perry if he wanted to leave the show during addiction struggles

The one where they remember Matthew Perry.

“Friends” creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane spoke about the late actor and learning of his addiction during the show in an interview with The Times U.K. published Friday.

“By the time we became aware of it, we were already a family on a lot of levels,” said Crane, 67.

“There was a point where we said to him: ‘Do you want to stop [being in the show]?’ And he was adamantly like: ‘No, this is really important to me,’ ” Crane recalled.

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Perry played Chandler Bing on the beloved NBC sitcom, which aired from 1994 to 2004.

In his 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry opened up about his addiction and how it affected his performance on “Friends.”

“You can track the trajectory for my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season,” Perry wrote in his book.

“When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee , it’s lots of pills,” he said.

Perry revealed that one of his stints in rehab took place immediately after filming Chandler’s wedding to Monica Geller (Courteney Cox). He shared he was “driven back to the treatment center … in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician” right after the scene wrapped.

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The late star also said that Season 9 was the only season of the show he was fully sober for.

As he recounted in his book, Perry went to rehab 15 times and had undergone 14 surgeries to try and mitigate the damage done to his stomach lining due to alcohol and opioid use. He also estimated that he spent around $9 million trying to get sober.

In October 2023, the “17 Again” star was found dead in his hot tub at age 54 after a ketamine overdose .

Kauffman, 67, told The Times U.K. that she had “the most contact” with Perry of all six “Friends” stars before his death.

“About two weeks before [he died] he and I were FaceTiming and he seemed really good,” she shared.

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Kauffman went on, “Two things come to mind [about how to celebrate him]: one of them is to donate to drug treatment centres — let’s fight the disease. And the second way is to watch ‘Friends’ and remember him not as a man who died like that but as a man who was hilariously funny and brought joy to everybody.”

On Thursday, Perry’s live-in assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, and four others were charged in connection with the actor’s death.

His assistant told authorities he had administered at least 27 shots of ketamine to his boss during the final five days of his life alone — including the last three that prosecutors allege resulted in his “death and serious bodily injury.”

Iwamasa was charged alongside two doctors, Salvador Plasencia and Mark Chavez, as well as alleged street dealer Erik Fleming, and Jasveen Sangha, the so-called “Ketamine Queen of Los Angeles.”

Plasencia and Sangha are both charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine over Perry’s death.

Fleming, Iwamasa and Chavez all copped plea deals in exchange for pleading guilty to various charges, including conspiracy to distribute ketamine and conspiracy to distribute ketamine resulting in death.

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