Los Angeles – A day after Matthew Perry, the wise-cracking Chandler Bing on the hit NBC sitcom Friends, informed the world that he had entered an undisclosed rehabilitation facility on advice of doctors, damage control was in full swing.
Perry’s spokeswoman adamantly denied a report from an online gossip columnist on Tuesday that production had been halted on the actor’s latest movie. Likewise, NBC and Warner Bros. Television, which produces Friends, issued a statement wishing Perry well and insisting the show would remain in production, with original episodes continuing to air as scheduled.
Officials at the network and the studio said they could shoot around Perry, 31, on one of TV’s top-rated shows for the time being, but privately they acknowledged having no long-term game plan for a protracted absence of their star.
“I think everyone is just taking it day to day right now,” one insider told Reuters.
Even NBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker expressed a measure of doubt in a conference call with reporters, saying producers “don’t expect [Perry’s rehab] to have a big impact, but it’s still early and we can’t say beyond that.”
The situation recalls the uncertainty sparked by the arrest last November of Robert Downey Jr. on drug possession charges, just three months after he had been released from prison, entered rehab and renewed his acting career with the Fox network’s popular Ally McBeal series.
Downey, whose case is still pending, finished his original commitment to the show and ultimately returned for the remainder of the season, but his latest legal troubles cost him a role in a high-profile movie co-starring Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
For now, NBC is in no immediate danger of having to air Chandler-less episodes of Friends. Although four new segments remain to be filmed for the season, producers still have three original episodes of the series already done and ready to air. And with the February “sweeps” period ending Thursday, NBC was planning to air re-runs for much of March anyway, a network spokeswoman said.
As for Perry’s latest movie, the Paramount Pictures comedy Servicing Sara, co-starring British actress-model Elizabeth Hurley, his publicist denied a report by E! Online columnist Ted Casablanca that production had been shut down.
“I think they’ve got several days of scenes to do without Matthew, so they are in production,” Perry spokeswoman Lisa Kasteler said.
Paramount referred queries about the report to the movie’s production company, Mandalay Pictures, which did not return phone calls.
Prior to last week’s production hiatus on Friends, Perry had been juggling two production schedules, working on the film Saturday through Wednesday and showing up for the TV show on Thursdays and Fridays, Kasteler said.
In announcing Monday that he had entered rehab, Kasteler did not disclose the nature of his illness. The announcement came four months after Perry said in an Us Weekly magazine interview that he was giving up “hard living” and drinking after being hospitalised last spring for acute pancreatis – an ailment he attributed in part to alcohol abuse and prescription drugs.
Recent published reports have said that Perry became addicted to painkillers after a skiing accident, but in the Us interview, he denied rumours that he was on drugs or was in need of a liver transplant as a result of drinking.
Perry voluntarily underwent treatment three years ago for dependency on the painkiller Vicodin, and his weight has ballooned up and down since then.