Matthew Perry Pulled Out of ‘Don’t Look Up’ After Breaking 8 Ribs in CPR When Heart Stopped Beating

Matthew Perry is revealing why he never appeared in Adam McKay‘s 2021 Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up after he was spotted filming scenes for the movie, but didn’t make the final cut. In an excerpt from his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing published in Rolling Stone, Perry said a health scare prevented him from carrying out his cameo.

While Perry was slated to star in the climate crisis satire alongside Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, a heart issue and the damage following prevented him from appearing in the movie, Perry writes in his new book.

The Friends star was being treated at a rehab center in Switzerland at the time he was filming Don’t Look Up, Perry recalls in his memoir, and had been lying to doctors about the severity of his stomach pain so he could be prescribed more drugs. While Perry was taking hydrocodone provided by his doctors, he was also set to have a “medical device” placed in his back through surgery to help manage his pain.

When the day came for his surgery, Perry had been up the night before taking hydrocodone, and was given a shot of propofol at 11 a.m. that morning.

“I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart,” Perry writes. “For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating.”

He continues, “I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest. If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?”

Perry adds, “He may have saved my life, but he also broke eight of my ribs.”

After the pain of breaking his ribs, Perry had to pull out of Don’t Look Up in a “heartbreaking” choice. While he filmed one group scene — during which he was “on 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone,” per Rolling Stone — it was never included in the final edit of the film.

Perry’s character, a republican journalist, was supposed to share three scenes with Streep’s delusional president in the film, but Perry never filmed with the Oscar-winning actress after leaving what he calls the “biggest movie I’d gotten ever.”