Most days, that means waking up at his four-bedroom hilltop home "around 7 or 8. I watch the Today show and make coffee, then I go play tennis and go to work" -- in one of his two BMWs ("a convertible for when it doesn't bother me that everyone's staring" and an X5 "for when I want to hide"). In his CD player? Bruce Springsteen's latest, along with melancholy jazz singer Norah Jones. "I still have that dorky taste in music where if you're a woman in emotional distress and write a song about it, I'll play the song over and over," he says. "If you're a lesbian, I'll buy it twice."

After his summer hiatus from Friends, returning to Stage 24 at Warner Bros. Studios on Aug. 13 -- along with costars Matt LeBlanc, 35, David Schwimmer, 35, Jennifer Aniston, 33, Courteney Cox Arquette, 38, and Lisa Kudrow, 39 -- "was like going back to school," says Perry. "You show up. Tell stories about your summer. The first week we were a little rusty. There was a lot of laughing and going, 'Oh my God, have we forgotten how to do this?' " he says. "But three days in, we were back on track."

Getting his own life on track was considerably harder. The only child of John Bennett Perry, an actor best known for the Old Spice commercials in the 1970s, and mom Suzanne Morrison, a former press secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (now divorced, both have since remarried), Perry displayed a competitive streak -- and a love of tennis -- early on, rising in the junior rankings in Ottawa until relocating to L.A. with his father in '84. There, after turning to acting, he burned through a series of failed TV shows before landing Friends in '94. "All the superficial things about (fame) came true," he says of the show's success. "I was naive enough to think it would fulfill all aspects of my life."

Perry traces his addiction troubles to 1997, when he developed a dependency on Vicodin following a Jet Ski accident. "It wasn't my intention to have a problem with it," he says. "But from the start I liked how it made me feel, and I wanted to get more." As his addiction escalated, "I was out of control and very unhealthy," says Perry, who lost around 20lbs. from his 6-ft. frame. "I returned to my original birth weight," he jokes.