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Perry’s heart apparently stopped for five straight minutes.

2021’s Don’t Look Up featured an absolutely jam-packed cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence. Apparently, though, this cast was also meant to include another famous face: veteran actor Matthew Perry. Perry was originally slated to play a journalist character opposite Streep, appearing in several scenes as a minor character. However, during the production of the film, Perry experienced a severe medical emergency.

At the time of the production, Perry had been going through rehab for substance abuse, and had been taking the drug hydrocodone for an ongoing stomach problem. “In fact, I was OK,” Perry writes in his new memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. “It still felt like I was constantly doing a sit-up — so it was very uncomfortable — but it wasn’t pain.”

Perry was set to undergo surgery to address this problem, but the night before it was scheduled, he took a large dose of his hydrocodone. During the surgery, when he was put under, Perry’s heart stopped entirely for five straight minutes.

"I've probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober."

In his new memoir, "Friends" star Matthew Perry gets serious about his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. https://t.co/f1JtNAtTVd

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 23, 2022

“I was given the shot at 11:00 a.m. I woke up eleven hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating. 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.”

Perry had only filmed one scene for Don’t Look Up at the time, but had to leave the project to recover from the surgery and this incident. As such, the scene ended up being scrapped.