Could he be any more successful? Nearly two decades after Friends came to an end, Matthew Perry opened up about his residual income from the popular sitcom.
During an episode of SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, which was posted on Monday, October 31, host Andy Cohen asked Perry how much he still earns from Friends reruns.
“You talked with Diane Sawyer about the resurgence of Friends over the last few years, and it made me wonder. Are the Friends checks that come in today, would you characterize them as bountiful checks?” the Bravo producer, 54, asked. “Or would you say it’s a trickle at this point?”
In response, the actor, 53, joked, “Well, yesterday I bought Iowa.” Perry noted that the checks are “not bad,” adding, “And they come in form of a text. ‘You just made this.’ And I go, ‘Oh, great.’”
The Massachusetts native rose to stardom after bringing Chandler Bing to life on Friends. The sitcom, which ran on NBC from 1994 to 2004, also starred Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer.
Earlier this month, the 17 Again star reflected on his time playing Chandler amid his battle with addiction.
“You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season — 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 wrote in his memoir, Friends, Lovers & The Big Terrible Thing. “Compare … how I look between the final episode of season six and the first of season seven — the Chandler-Monica proposal episodes.”
Perry continued: “I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven [it’s supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season.”
According to the Go On alum, his costars on Friends supported him on set amid his personal issues. “In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better. This is what my costars on Friends did for me,” he detailed. “But still, the addiction ravaged me. One time, in a scene in the coffeehouse when I’m dressed in a suit, I fell asleep right there on the couch, and disaster was averted only when Matt LeBlanc nudged me awake right before my line; no one noticed, but I knew how close I’d come.”
At the time, a source exclusively told Us Weekly that Aniston, 53, “always took time to listen” to Perry following the end of Friends. “Matthew feels that these people who stood by him when the chips were down, Jennifer included, saved his life without question,” the insider added. “They gave him the will to carry on and get healthy, even though it took a huge amount of willpower of his own.”
