Fame almost destroyed Friends star Matthew Perry. Now, as he makes his West End stage debut, he tells Neil Norman how he beat his addictions.

Matthew Perry looks great. This is not, I realise, a particularly profound observation but given his history, it is significant. It wasn’t that long ago that Perry looked very far from great. “I was one of those people who thought that fame would bring happiness,” he says. “So if I hadn’t had it, I’d still be chasing it. It’s fortunate that, as a result of doing Friends, I became very famous and I know now that it is not all great.”

One of the consequences of fame is that if you’ve had an interesting history, complete with alcohol and drug-related problems, and have been photographed in various stages of addiction and splashed all over the tabloids, then the preconceptions about where you are at, right here, right now, are set in stone. Sitting opposite Perry in the smart but comfortable confines of the Century Club there is little evidence of his past misdeeds, in either his face or figure. God knows, we’ve seen him fat, we’ve seen him thin. We’Ve seen him bloated with vodka and Vicodin and all manner of incremental vices. This is one 34-year-old who’s been there, done that - and got the hair-shirt.

But in the post-Friends guise of young American actor about to embark on the (now) traditional testing ground of the West End stage, he is the picture of health. Lightly tanned, healthily stubbled, smiling. He smokes cigarettes and drinks coffee - but not in an addict sort of way.
Perry is in rehearsal for the West End revival of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a sulphurous comedy drama of bad manners and sexual mores among youngish professional types in the Windy city during the Seventies. It’s a bleak and bitter view of heterosexual relationship - a prototype entry in the genre that the film director Neil Labute mined two decades later. It was filmed in 1986 as About Last Night… with Demi Moore and Rob Lowe.

“As a matter of fact, I was a huge fan of that movie when it first came out,” says Perry. “But they really softened it up. It is a very brutal play and it poses the questions but doesn’t necessarily give the answers. If we do our job right, they’ll be standing around talking outside the theatre and missing the train home. In television or a movie I bring my own ego and consequently can mess up. In the theatre I learnt very quickly to shut up and listen. Now I am able to get out of my own way.”

Staying out of his own way is a phrase he repeats in one form or another like a mantra. Sobriety has brought a clarity of thought and self-awareness that necessitates “smashing your ego”. So far it seems to be having a beneficial effect.
Intriguingly, Perry tells me that he had auditioned for the same play two years before Friends. He is not unaware of the irony. “I auditioned for a production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago about 12 years ago for a 35-seat theatre on Melrose in L.A. I didn’T get a call back. And now I get a call in my trailer on a Bruce Willis movie, being offered the lead in the same play.”
He doesn’t have to add: “Go figure”.

Friends, of course, is a phenomenon. The deceptively simple set-up allows for maximum interplay between six characters who are not so much in search of an author (the “Gag Gulag” contains the customarily high number of script writers for US television series) as a meaning to their lives. The group maintains a one-for-all-and-all-for-one policy on the show, which is particularly useful when it comes to negotiating fees - its last egg next January, when the series comes to an end after nearly 10 years. Will he miss it?
“Yes. It’s been my ideal job. You go to work at 9am and get to be funny all day and get paid. There isn’t a jerk in the crew. I had no idea how huge the show was going to be. But it seemed like magic from the very first run-through.”

Perry is not the first - nor will he be the last - to have been caught between the rock of celebrity and the hard place of mucho moolah. But the fact that he managed to survive says much about his strength of character. “It’s actually not a matter of strength,” he says. “Alcoholics and addicts are not the strongest-willed people in town. It’s about having a crossroads in your life and seeing a moment of clarity. It is about surrender rather than strength. I can’t take too much credit for it. It’s like somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Do you want to live or do you want to die?’ I chose to live. I suppose there is a certain own inflated ego. ‘To stay out of you own way’ - that’s a key term for sobriety. It’s like smashing any illusions you have about stars. I mean, going to go back to my “flat” and read my lines and get a frozen dinner and go to sleep. You can’t imagine Paul Newman doing that. We are pedestalised and it serves its purpose. But when you personalise it you become miserable and a jerk because it is not real. And it took a life change for me to see that.”

Fame and money and good looks also bring the inevitable gallery of high-profile girlfriends, Julia Roberts, Heather Graham and Jennifer Capriati are just some of the names with whom he has been linked. He is, he says, aware of the fact that serious friendships have to be earned. And he anticipates becoming a father. “Family? Yeah. I think that’s one of the reasons we’re here. To have kids.”
Meanwhile, he is happily dating a girl called Rachel Dunn who, he is relieved to reveal, is not in the wonderful business called show. “I have a girl in New York. Nobody famous. She called me yesterday with the hockey scores.” He grins hugely, drains the last of his coffee.
“Now, I ask you. What better thing could a girl do?”