Matthew Perry One-Year Death Anniversary: Tragic Star's Mom Says Drug-Addled 'Friends' Actor Had 'Strong Premonition' About His Sad Ketamine Overdose Fate
Matthew Perry passed away in 2023 from a ketamine overdose.
Oct. 28 2024, Published 5:17 p.m. ET
Matthew Perry's mother, Suzanne Perry, recently opened up about her son's mindset days before his passing, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
An autopsy revealed the actor died from the acute effects of ketamine.
“He went through a period, interestingly enough, just before he died when he was showing me one of his new houses,” the former press secretary told Savannah Guthrie in a preview of their interview shared on Friday, October 25. “He came up to me and he said, ‘I love you so much, and I’m so happy to be with you now. And I’m so.’”
Suzanne said: “It was almost as though it was a premonition or something. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I thought, ‘How long has it been since we’ve had a conversation like that?’ It’s been years. There was an inevitability to what was going to happen next to him, and he felt it very strongly.”
Matthew Perry admitted he experimented with ketamine in his memoir, 'Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.'
Matthew died due to the “acute effects of ketamine” on October 28, 2023, after years of struggling with substance abuse.
She said: “But he said, ‘I’m not frightened anymore.’ And it worried me."
Savannah was sympathetic to Matthew's public battle with substance abuse.
“There’s so much pain and sorrow, but [they] also have a real sense of purpose about the work that he was doing, helping others get sober,” she said. “It was the purpose of his life, and so there’s some stuff to announce around that too.”
Matthew Perry was found unresponsive in his hot tub.
In Matthew's memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, he discussed experimenting with ketamine one year before overdosing on the substance.
“[It] has my name written all over it — they might as well have called it ‘Matty,’” he wrote. “Ketamine felt like a giant exhale. They’d bring me into a room, sit me down, put headphones on me so I would listen to music, blindfold me, and put an IV in.”
He added: “I would disassociate, see things — I’d been in therapy for so long that I wasn’t even freaked out by this. Oh, there’s a horse over there? Fine — might as well be. As the music played and the K ran through me, it all became about the ego, and the death of the ego.”
Perry was best known for his role as Chandler in 'Friends.'
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Ketamine infusion therapy has become increasingly popular in Hollywood, as the DEA claims it's a “dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects” and “can induce a state of sedation, immobility, relief from pain and amnesia.”
Matthew stated: “I often thought that I was dying during that hour. ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘this is what happens when you die.' Yet I would continually sign up for this s--- because it was something different, and anything different is good.”
Although he initially liked the feeling, Matthew explained that he decided “ketamine was not for me.”
The “hangover was rough,” he wrote, adding that he felt “like a f------ pincushion.”
According to reports, Matthew had been sober for 19 months before being found unresponsive in the hot tub of his Los Angeles, Calif., home.
