Perry Cleans Up, Slims Down

October 26, 2000 -- LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — Friends star Matthew Perry says his partying days are over after a health scare earlier this year forced him to straighten out his life.

Perry, who appeared as a dramatically thinner Chandler in the new season of the hit NBC sitcom, denies tabloid press rumors that he was on drugs or that he had damaged his liver so badly because of drinking that he needed a transplant.

Perry, 31, tells US Weekly in an interview to be published Friday that he had lost 20 pounds since being hospitalized in May with acute pancreatitis — a rare, recurring stomach inflammation that is caused partly by alcohol abuse and prescription drugs.

The actor says the reason he looked so skinny on the Friends season premiere is because he was still recuperating from the illness. "I was still healing. I couldn't eat more than chicken soup," he says. "By the second episode, you can see I'm better."

"You play, you pay," US Weekly quotes Perry as saying.

Perry, who had voluntary treatment three years ago for dependency on the painkiller Vicodin and whose weight has ballooned up and down since then, says the pancreatitis episode scared him.

"It was time to put back the pieces back together and that's what I did," he says, adding, "I'm back on my feet again and feeling fine."

Perry claims he is sober, having not been to any of his old nightclub haunts for six months, and is now looking forward to settling down and having children.

"I don't think I'm going to meet my wife at the Sky Bar," he says. "My 20s were about work — making enough money so that I could do what I wanted to do — and partying, stuff like that.

"I think, I hope, that my 30s are going to be more about developing my social skills in a way I haven't done before so that I get married in my 30s and have children in my 30s," he tells the magazine.