Matthew Perry’s debate with Peter Hitchens over addiction has gone viral following the actor’s death.
The Friends star, who died suddenly aged 54 on Saturday (October 28), was a strong advocate for addiction recovery in his later years, and often spoke frankly about his own struggles with drug and alcohol abuse.
In 2013, Perry debated drug courts – where former addicts would sit as magistrates – on BBC’s Newsnight alongside drug policy reform advocate Baroness Meacher and controversial author and journalist Peter Hitchens.
During the debate, the conversation turned towards the nature of addiction and whether it should be classed as a disease, which Hitchens deemed a “fantasy”.
In response, Perry called his views “ludicrous” and encouraged him to “read something other than your book” on the subject, in reference to his essay The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender To Drugs.
Perry later recalled the TV appearance in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, where he described Hitchens as a “complete tool”.
“I like to think that both the Baroness and I ran rings around him – but frankly, that wasn’t hard,” Perry wrote. “He didn’t like that much, and eventually the interview ended with [Jeremy] Paxman and Baroness Meacher simply laughing out loud at how stupid and cruel Hitchens sounded.”
Perry added that Hitchens proved “that he knew nothing about either me, or the subject on which he pontificated”.
After the clip went viral online following Perry’s death, Hitchens made an appearance on Talk TV where he discussed the debate in hindsight.
Hitchens, who described Perry as an “engaging guy”, said: “It’s a clash between two fundamentally opposed ideas of morality and philosophy.
“He’s an engaging guy to be in the same room as… It was a clash between two fundamentally opposed ideas of morality and philosophy!”
Peter Hitchens reacts fondly to a clip of his BBC Newsnight appearance with the late actor Matthew Perry.@Iromg | @ClarkeMicah | #TalkTV pic.twitter.com/APhxwucw4s
— TalkTV (@TalkTV) October 30, 2023
“I disparage the idea of addiction because I believe fundamentally that we have free will and choice in what we do, and this is not an argument which you can settle. And other people prefer to believe that we don’t have choice and free will and their are actions discerned by forces we can’t control. This is a huge argument well worth having, and that’s what it was.”
Following his death, Perry’s co-stars on Friends paid tribute in a joint statement, describing it as an “unfathomable loss”.
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