Perry Doc Trailer Features $7 Million Sobriety Revelation

"I said, 'God, you can do anything you want to me. Just please make me famous,'" he says in archival interview audio. Fame was the only thing he asked for.

What comes next is the moment the ask seemed answered. "I got a phone call, and I instantly knew my whole life was gonna change," Perry says. The call brought him the part of Chandler Bing on Friends, the ensemble sitcom created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman that aired on NBC from September 1994 to May 2004. Perry was twenty-four and the youngest of the six leads when the pilot was cast. The show made him one of television's most recognizable comic performers. Critics noted the precision timing and the strain of vulnerability he brought to the role; audiences carried both for a decade.

Netflix dropped the official trailer for the three-part documentary The One About Matthew Perry around September 29 and 30, 2026. In archival interview audio in the trailer, Perry returns to what fame delivered and what it left alone. "I was extremely happy when I got famous," he says. "Then it was like, 'Uh-oh. This didn't fix what's inside me. This didn't do what I thought it was gonna do.'"

He had asked to be famous, become famous, and found the rest of him untouched. Mia Perry Bowick names what remained. "My brother would talk about that feeling of emptiness or loneliness that he couldn't quite fill," she says. The emptiness ran alongside the success, not after it ended. The one thing that reliably cut through, by her account, was not more fame. "When he made people laugh, it made him feel good."

Laughter eased what the career did not. Closing the rest became the other long fight of his adult life. Mia Perry Bowick states the number on camera as plain fact. "He spent $7 million trying to get sober. That's how seriously he took his disease."

He went to rehab fifteen times. He attended roughly six thousand Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Those stays and those rooms were the work behind the figure she named, the concrete measure of how hard he kept returning to the same fight.

Seven million dollars.

The sum sat beside the career the world already knew. It did not replace the emptiness he had named for himself, and it did not end the disease. It only showed what he was willing to spend trying. The roots reached back years before the phone call that made him famous, into habits that took hold while he was still a teenager.

He began drinking at fourteen. By eighteen he was drinking every day. The pattern was already fixed long before anyone knew the name Chandler Bing.

A jet-ski accident brought Vicodin into the picture. Vicodin is an opioid painkiller, prescribed for short-term pain, with a maximum recommended daily dose of eight pills. He developed an addiction to it after the accident. By the end of the third season of Friends he was taking around fifty-five pills a day.

Fifty-five pills a day.

That load ran alongside the sitcom’s rise. The dependence and the work occupied the same years. In 2022 he published the memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, his own public accounting of the addiction and the years spent trying to stop. The three-part series now expands that record from the outside, through the people who watched the disease take hold and watched him fight it.

Mary Robertson directs. She is known for Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV. Robertson executive produces alongside Lisa Kalikow, Eli Holzman, and Aaron Saidman. Lora Moftah serves as co-executive producer, Jessica Call as producer. Maxine Productions, part of Sony Pictures Television, makes the series.

The people who sit for the camera knew him outside the main cast. Longtime friends David Pressman and Roger Castillo appear, as do several former girlfriends. Former NBC president Warren Littlefield and Season 1 Friends writer Jeff Strauss give firsthand accounts of the early sitcom years. Two people he met in recovery, Evelyn Sallinger and Tim Harrington, speak as well. Harrington was Perry’s roommate in the early 2000s and credits him with saving his life. None of the Friends co-stars appear.

Mia Perry Bowick frames why she agreed to talk. “It’s taken time for me to feel ready to share these memories and what it was like to love Matthew through all the complexity of his life, to see him as a whole person, not just as Chandler, and not just as someone who struggled with addiction,” she says. “Matthew had a beautiful heart and a generous spirit, and even in his darkest moments, he could still make you laugh and feel loved. I hope this series gives everyone who loved him, whether personally or from afar, a deeper appreciation for who he truly was and the legacy he leaves behind.”

The full three parts premiere together on Netflix on October 27, 2026, one day before the third anniversary of his death. Matthew Perry died on October 28, 2023, at age fifty-four. The cause was the acute effects of ketamine, exacerbated by accidental drowning in the hot tub at his Los Angeles home.