Matthew Perry lost movie gig after his 'heart stopped for 5 minutes'

Addiction-troubled former "Friends" star Matthew Perry says in his upcoming memoir he could not participate in last year's Leonardo DiCaprio-Jennifer Lawrence film "Don't Look Up" after suffering a 5-minute heart stoppage and eight broken ribs.

He had been cast, writes Perry in "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing" (Flatiron Books), being published Nov. 1, by the political satire's director and co-writer, Adam McKay ("Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" and its sequel).

"[T]his would be the biggest movie I’d gotten ever," the 53-year-old actor writes. "I was to play a Republican journalist and was supposed to have three scenes with Meryl Streep. … I got to do a group scene (with Jonah Hill among others) in Boston where the movie was filmed — I was on 1,800 milligrams of [the pain-treatment opioid] hydrocodone then, too, but nobody noticed."

Perry continued on to a luxury rehab clinic in Switzerland, planning to return to Boston for more filming. The facility "was at a villa on Lake Geneva with its own butler and chef, the kind of luxurious place where you were guaranteed to not meet anybody else. … But what it lacked in fellow sufferers it made up for in the easy availability of drugs…."

Perry said he falsely complained of intense stomach pain and was given both his usual 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone — "To put that in perspective, if you broke your thumb, and had a kind doctor, he or she would probably prescribe you five 0.5-milligram pills." — along with daily infusions of ketamine, a short-acting anesthetic with hallucinogenic effects.

"At some point, the rehab geniuses decided that to help my stomach 'pain,' they’d put some kind of weird medical device in my back, but they’d need to do surgery to insert it. So I stayed up all night, taking 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone ahead of the next day’s surgery. In the operating room they gave me [the anesthetic] propofol …. I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m. I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital."

The propofol, he writes, "had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating. … I was told that some beefy Swiss ... [doctor] really didn’t want the guy from 'Friends' dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest. … He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight of my ribs."

With that injury, Perry writes, "there was no way I could continue, so I never got to do my scenes with Meryl. It was heartbreaking, but I was in too much pain." As for what the actor had shot earlier, McKay "ended up not using the scene."

Perry writes that he is currently sober and in recovery. The actor, who received an Emmy nomination for "Friends" and three more for "The West Wing" and other work, opens his five-date book tour Nov. 2 at The Town Hall in Manhattan. He'll also be interviewed by Diane Sawyer for an hourlong ABC News special Friday night at 8.