Elizabeth Hurley described working with Matthew Perry at the height of his drug and alcohol addiction as a “nightmare.”
Although Hurley has “very fond memories” of the actor while they filmed “Serving Sara,” she admitted they didn’t always get along.
“To be honest, it was a nightmare working with him at that time and, as it’s now known, our movie was shut down because of his addiction,” the actress, 57, told Yahoo! Entertainment on Wednesday about the 2002 rom-com.
“We were in a force majeure and had to all sit at home twiddling our thumbs for some time,” she noted, adding that it was “rough.”
Despite the fact they had to scrap all of their pre-filmed scenes, Hurley said Perry, 53, “was fabulous” to work with when he came back from his two-month stint in rehab.
“It was tough, obviously he was having a tough time, but he was still very charming and a lovely person to work with,” the “Austin Powers” star continued. “But you could see he was suffering for sure.”
The “Friends” alum got candid about his decades-long battle with addiction in his new memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” where he said he knew Hurley and director Reginald Hudlin were “pissed off” about the situation.
“Of course, the movie tanked anyway,” the actor wrote about the movie, which he had to shoot a second time because he had slurred his words the first time around.
“I was paid $3.5 million to do the movie and I got sued for the shutdown, even though it was a health issue. At the mediation table a team of insurance flacks faced me down, so I just wrote them a check for $650,000,” he explained.
In an explosive interview with Diane Sawyer, Perry revealed that he was working on the rom-com and his hit ABC sitcom at the same time, leading the over-worked actor to spiral.
“It was shot in Dallas and I was doing ‘Friends’ at the same time, so it doubled my workload. And I was flying on a private jet drinking vodka out of a water bottle,” he said.
The actor also revealed that, at the height of his addiction, he was taking “55 Vicodin a day,” in addition to “Methadone, Xanax” and “a full quart of vodka.”
In fact, over the course of his life, the actor estimates he spent over $9 million dollars trying to get sober — only for a near-death experience to finally make him change his ways.
Perry “nearly died” four years ago after his colon burst and doctors told him he had a “2 percent” chance of survival.
The actor spent two weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital due to the rupture. Yet according to Perry, the worst part was having to use a colostomy bag for nine months.
“My therapist said, ‘The next time you think about taking OxyContin, just think about having a colostomy bag for the rest of your life,’” he told People magazine last month. “And a little window opened, and I crawled through it, and I no longer want OxyContin.”
While Perry is now 18 months sober, he knows the damage of his addiction will likely kill him one day.
“Not only do I have the disease, but I also have it bad. I have it as bad as you can have it, in fact. It’s back-to-the-wall time all the time. It’s going to kill me ….” he concluded in the jaw-dropping memoir.
