Friends star Matthew Perry has died aged 54, TMZ is reporting.
The beloved actor was reportedly found dead at his home in the Los Angeles area on Saturday morning.
According to TMZ, emergency services rushed to the address following a call, which was first reported as a cardiac arrest.
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Sources initially told TMZ the actor had drowned in his hot tub, but it was later claimed he had collapsed shortly after a two-hour game of pickleball.
An assistant is believed to have found the star and called 911.
In a statement to Page Six, LA police confirmed: “We responded to the 1800 block of Blue Sail Rd for a death investigation on a male [at] 4:10 pm this afternoon.
“He was in his 50s.”
The actor is most famous for his role as Chandler Bing on Friends, in which he appeared for its entire decade-long run from 1994 until 2004.
The series also starred Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow.
Throughout his career, Perry also appeared in numerous other TV shows including Boys Will Be Boys, Growing Pains, Ally McBeal, The West Wing and Scrubs, as well as in blockbuster films such as The Whole Nine Yards, 17 Again, Fools Rush In and Three To Tango.\
However, the star had kept a low profile in recent years, and was most recently seen shopping in LA last month.
While the Friends star never married, he was briefly engaged to Molly Hurwitz, but the pair called off the wedding in mid-2021.
Prior to that, he’d been linked to Mean Girls actress Lizzy Caplan.
Perry had generated plenty of headlines that same month after sharing the shocking details of his past in his bombshell memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
In the book, he opened up about his decades-long addiction to drugs and alcohol, revealing that he’d almost died during that time.
“Not only do I have the disease, but I also have it bad,” Perry wrote in his memoir.
“I have it as bad as you can have it, in fact. It’s back-to-the-wall time all the time. It’s going to kill me …“Robert Downey Jr., talking about his own addiction, once said, ‘It’s like I have a gun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the metal.’ I got it; I understand that.
“Even on good days, when I’m sober and I’m looking forward, it’s still with me all the time. There’s still a gun. Fortunately, I guess, there’s not enough opiates in the world to make me high anymore.”
Perry also recounted how his family was told he had a 2 per cent chance of survival after his colon burst from opioid overuse when he was just 49 years old. The horrifying ordeal saw him spend two weeks in a coma and requiring a colostomy bag for nine months.
Last year, the actor told People magazine that his addiction issues had just started to surface when he was cast on Friends at the age of 24, and that at its horrifying peak, he was taking 55 Vicodin a day and weighed only 58kgs.
“I could handle it, kind of. But by the time I was 34, I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble,” he admits. “But there were years that I was sober during that time. Season 9 was the year that I was sober the whole way through. And guess which season I got nominated for best actor? I was like, ‘That should tell me something.’”
However, he struggled to get on top of it for years.
“I didn’t know how to stop,” he said. “If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail,’ I’d start packing. I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”
However, Perry told the publication that he’d finally beaten his addictions in recent years.
“I’m a pretty healthy guy right now,” he told People.
“What I’m most surprised with is my resilience. The way that I can bounce back from all of this torture and awfulness,” said Perry.
“Wanting to tell the story, even though it’s a little scary to tell all your secrets in a book, I didn’t leave anything out. Everything’s in there.”
Originally published as Friends star Matthew Perry at 54
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