Perry shared that he temporarily lost a friend after he was cast on the NBC hit, having landed the part after close pal Craig Bierko choose to star in another pilot rather than play Chandler. The decision that led Bierko to not speak to Perry for years. In the plus column, though, the series saved him.

"It is not out of the realms of possibility that I may have ended up on the streets of downtown LA shooting heroin in my arm until my untimely death," he wrote, adding that it was "such a good and fun job" that it was worth remaining sober—"for awhile, at least."

"I was the second baseman for the New York Yankees. I couldn't f--k that up," he reasoned. "I would never forgive myself. When you're earning $1 million a week, you can't afford to have the seventeenth drink."

But it would be his friends on Friends that would help to once save his life a second time during the show's run, most notably Aniston, who confronted Perry about his drinking.

"'We can smell it,' she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural 'we' hit me like a sledgehammer," Perry wrote of the conversation, which he described as "devastating" and said led him to hire a sober companion at work (though he later revealed that the ninth season was the only one he was wholly sober for).

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