All of these tidbits come out as the 31-year-old Friends star finally spills his guts--and his pancreas--in the latest edition Us Weekly, following a summer rife with health problems and unlucky disasters, like that Porsche-meets-porch incident in May.
In an interview that hits newsstands Friday, Perry says he lost 20 pounds after being hospitalized last spring for acute pancreatitis, a rare inflammation caused partly by years of alcohol abuse and prescription drugs.
And although his character, Chandler, may look a bit frail in this season's early episodes of Friends, Perry is now reportedly fitter, happier and healthier--also healthy enough to tackle tabloid rumors that he had been on drugs ("Not true"), or that he needed a liver transplant ("That's absolutely false").
"In my case, it was hard living and drinking hard and eating poorly," he tells the mag. "You play, you pay."
"But there were no pills involved," he adds. "I learned my lesson at Hazelden."
Hazelden is the drug treatment center in Minnesota that Perry checked himself into three years ago, after getting hooked on Vicodin, a painkiller he started taking after a Jet-Ski accident.
Since that time, the actor's weight has ballooned up and down. But Perry tells the celeb magazine he's sober, feeling healthier than ever and hasn't been to any of his old nightclub stomping grounds in six months. He also says he's in a different frame of mind nowadays, having grown tired of the partying lifestyle.
"I don't think I'm going to meet my wife at the Sky Bar," he says referring to a Sunset Strip nightspot. "I hope I don't. My father told me the right girl for me is going to be sitting in the corner talking to somebody. It's not the girl in the middle of the room making everyone laugh."
Perry also pipes up about the May 20 incident in which he crashed his Porsche into a house. The accident happened just hours after he had been hospitalized.
"The irony was terrible," he says. "I was going to hang with my father at his place outside L.A. I made the first corner around my house on these really narrow streets, saw a courier van in the middle, swerved to the right and--well, I don't really know what happened--I crashed into this porch."
With those troubles out of the way, Perry says he's hoping to make a fresh start of it in his next decade. Besides life ain't all that bad, given that the Friends have returned to NBC with huge ratings, and they're making $750,000 per episode. He's also currently dating an unnamed "girl" who works "behind the camera" in the entertainment industry.
"My twenties were about work--making enough money so that I could do what I wanted to do--and partying, stuff like that," he tells the magazine. "I think--I hope--my thirties are going to be more about developing my social skills in a way I haven't done before so that I get married in my thirties and have a child in my thirties."