Matthew Perry believes he's spent around $9 million (£7.8 million) trying to get sober.

In his upcoming memoir, the Friends actor candidly lifts the lid on his long-running addiction to alcohol and painkillers.

When asked to estimate how much he's spent battling his addiction, he told The New York Times on Sunday, "I've probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober."

Matthew acknowledged that most addicts don't have his resources but noted that they have "the gift of anonymity" while his struggles have been chronicled publicly.

The 53-year-old has been clean for 18 months and he still has to work on his sobriety every day.

"It's still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn't end because I did this (memoir)," he stated.

In an excerpt from his book, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, published in Britain's The Times over the weekend, Matthew recalled how his co-star Jennifer Aniston confronted him in his trailer about his drinking.

"'I know you're drinking,' she said," he remembered. "I had long since gotten over her - ever since she started dating Brad Pitt, I was fine - and had worked out exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward, but still, to be confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating.

"'How can you tell?' I said. I never worked drunk. 'I've been trying to hide it...' 'We can smell it,' she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural 'we' hit me like a sledgehammer. 'I know I'm drinking too much,' I said, 'but I don't exactly know what to do about it.'"

The actor also charted his addiction via moments in the show, revealing that by the end of season three, he had to take 55 Vicodin painkillers a day otherwise he'd get "so sick", and after he filmed Chandler's wedding to Courteney Cox's Monica in 2001, he was "driven back to the treatment center… in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician."

The memoir will be released on 1 November.

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