In addition to stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet and Jonah Hill, Matthew Perry should also be involved in “Don’t Look Up”. However, according to official Netflix stats, there is nothing of him to be seen in the second most watched movie on the streaming platform after “Red Notice”. After the release of Adam McKay’s (“The Big Short”) satire in late December 2021, many fans complained about Perry’s absence. They regretted that the ‘Friends’ star had been cut from the film, although the circulating footage showed him filming a scene with Jonah Hill.
As Perry has now revealed, the scene with Hill is the only one he shot. The fact that further sequences were not shot as planned and were therefore removed from the film has to do with a rather dramatic incidentas he reveals in his forthcoming autobiography, Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing.
» “Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing: The FRIENDS Star’s Autobiography” at Amazon*
Of the quoted from an excerpt from the book that will be available from November 1, 2022. In it, Perry, who was a long-time drug addict and would play a Republican journalist in “Don’t Look Up,” explains that at the time he also ran a rehab center in visited Switzerland. According to his own statement, he lied to the doctors there to gain access to the painkiller hydrocodone. But when the doctors wanted to operate on him and he was given the anesthetic propofol, the combination of both drugs led to cardiac arrest.
Matthew Perry: Did ‘Friends’ Save My Life?
He woke up 11 hours after the anesthetic in another clinic and only found that his heart had stopped for five full minutes. Then I was told that the Swiss doctors didn’t want the man from Friends to die on their operating table, so they kept doing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). They would have pounded his chest for five minutes—until his heart beat again.
“If I hadn’t been on ‘Friends’, would they have stopped after three minutes? Did ‘Friends’ save my life again?” writes Perry in his autobiography.
Too much pain to return to the Don’t Look Up set
The life-saving measures are also said to have resulted in eight broken ribs at the time. His resulting pain was too great to continue shooting “Don’t Look Up”. It broke his heart that he had to turn his back on the Netflix movie.
After all, it was “the best movie I’ve ever received”. He should have filmed scenes with Meryl Streep, among other things. With these scenes removed, the one sequence with Jonah Hill that had already been filmed no longer made sense and was therefore removed.