Matthew Perry should have been on top of the world by the end of Season Seven of "Friends," when his character, Chandler Bing, marries Monica Geller, played by Courteney Cox.
But behind the scenes of the fan-favorite episode, Perry was living in a rehab facility to deal with what would become a decades-long struggle with addiction.
The now 53-year-old actor opened up about the experience in his new memoir, "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing."
Perry revealed that his father lashed out at "Friends" co-creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane — threatening to "pull (Perry) off your television show" — when they inquired if Perry, who had told the pair he was now sober, was ready to come back to film the wedding.
"I was so grateful for him for being my dad and doing the dad thing, but I also didn’t want to be the problem. They were just doing their job; they had the number one hit TV show, and two of the main characters were about to get married. I couldn’t just disappear. I just wanted everything to be OK," Perry writes in the book.
Perry recalled being moved from the rehab facility where he was staying to the Promises treatment center in Malibu, where he was told he would need "months" more to recover.
"Two weeks later, I was driven to the set of 'Friends' by a technician from Malibu. When I arrived, Jen Aniston said, 'I’ve been mad at you,'" he writes.
"'Honey,' I said, 'if you knew what I’d been through, you would not be mad at me.'"
The pair "hugged" and, Perry writes, he "got the work done."
"I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in 'Friends,' the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician," he writes.
"Not all the lights were green on Sunset that night, let me tell ya," he adds.
Elsewhere in the book, Perry recalled that despite his co-stars "sobbing" all around him after filming the "Friends" finale in 2004, he "felt nothing."
At the time, Perry was taking buprenorphine, "a detox med," designed to help addicts withdrawal from harder opioids.
He describes a crew member yelling “That’s a wrap!” after the final scene and “tears sprang from almost everyone’s eyes like so many geysers.”
"We had made 237 episodes, including this last one, called, appropriately enough, ‘The Last One.’ Aniston was sobbing — after a while, I was amazed she had any water left in her entire body,” he writes. “Even Matt LeBlanc was crying.”
“But I felt nothing,” he continues. “I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside.”