In series one, episode 13 of Friends, Chandler Bing delivers a sardonic one-liner while sprawled on the couch of the Central Perk coffee house, boyishly good-looking in his bedraggled suit. Everyone laughs, especially Roger, the psychologist Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) is dating, who is as yet unversed in Chandler’s whip-smart humour.
“You’re so funny,” Roger says, then adds: “I wouldn’t wanna be there when the laughter stops.” Chandler’s smile fades, and he asks Roger what he means. “It just seems that maybe you have intimacy issues, that you use your humour to keep people at a distance … Only child, right? Parents divorced before you hit puberty? … It’s textbook.”
Matthew Perry was so similar to the wisecracking character he played that when he first read the script for Friends Like Us (later renamed Friends) in 1994, he said it was as if somebody had followed him around for a year, stolen his jokes and aped his “world-weary yet witty view of life”.
“It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler, I was Chandler,” he said of the character, who was known for such one-liners as: “Hi, I’m Chandler, I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable” and “I’m not great at advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?”
The likeness was so uncanny that Perry’s actor friends, who were auditioning for the series in 1994 and had also spotted the similarities, flocked to his apartment to seek his advice. Perry suggested techniques and claimed that most of his friends copied him, but when it came to his own audition he “broke all the rules”, ditching the script and landing jokes on odd emphases, a trick that would come to define his role and influence a generation of comedy actors.
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Much of Chandler’s humour, though already eerily matched with Perry’s own, was shaped by an interview the producers arranged with the cast before filming. Perry told them that he always filled silences with witticisms and that he “didn’t do well with women”. If Chandler was the funniest friend in Friends, then he was also the most cynical and unhappy; like Perry, he tended to mask his insecurities beneath a flimsy layer of bravado and well-timed jokes. Humour was a defence mechanism and Perry was so desperate to be liked that if he failed to score a laugh from the studio audience of Friends he would “sweat” and go into “convulsions”.
Perhaps his desire for fame sprang from the same pool of self-doubt. He was so hungry for stardom that, three weeks before his audition in 1994, he dropped to his knees and prayed. “God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.”
As he wrote in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (the “Thing” being a chronic addiction to alcohol and pills), he achieved the fame that he desired. At the start of Friends, Perry would visit the Beverly Center shopping mall in LA just to be recognised.
“But the Almighty, being the Almighty, had not forgotten the first part of that prayer as well,” he wrote. The fickle euphoria of success would only last about eight months and while Perry shot to meteoric levels of fame, he also plummeted into great depths of despair and addiction.
Friends, which ran from 1994 until 2004, chronicled the romantic misadventures and faltering careers of six cheerful but comically dysfunctional young people living in Manhattan, New York City. It became one of the most successful TV shows of all time and was popular in Britain, where it was shown on Channel 4. The atmosphere on set was electric, Perry recalled, and the decade of filming was his happiest. The cast were inseparable — they played poker, partied, ate every meal together — and Perry was in his element. “I was a song-and-dance man,” he said, “and this is where I excelled.” He pitched ten jokes a day for the show (two usually got in) and he wrote quips for the rest of the cast, which included Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer.
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After filming the first season they knew that it was going to be a hit, so the director Jimmy Burrows flew them to Las Vegas with some spending money to “blow off some steam”. “I filled that summer with three notable things,” Perry recalled. “Gambling in Vegas ... a trip to Mexico on my own, and a make-out session in a closet with Gwyneth Paltrow.”
Aniston was less keen to go out with Perry, despite his repeated efforts, but he did manage to catch the eye of Julia Roberts, whom the producers were trying to bag for a season two episode of Friends. She said that she would only appear if she could be in Chandler’s storyline, so Perry sent her flowers and a note that dripped with charm. “The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,” it read.
Roberts replied that if he could explain quantum physics to her then she would do the show. “The following day, I sent her a paper all about wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle and entanglement,” he recalled, “and only some of it was metaphorical.” She sent back bagels.
They courted for three months by fax and by the time she appeared in Friends they had started a relationship, but Perry broke up with her a few months later. “I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unloveable,” he wrote. “So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
As Roger the psychologist had guessed, Matthew Langford Perry was indeed born an only child, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1969, and he was not yet a year old when his parents divorced. His father, John Bennett Perry, a good-looking actor who had carved a niche playing police officers and the rugged sailor in Old Spice commercials, moved to LA, while Matthew lived in Ottawa with his Canadian mother Suzanne (née Morrison), who was the former press aide to the prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
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She remarried and Perry grew up lonely, rootless and insecure. He recalled beating up Trudeau’s son Justin at Rockcliffe Park elementary, a public school in a wealthy neighbourhood, because the future prime minister of Canada was better than him at sports.
He soon learnt to use humour as a more useful tool of deflection. At Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, he marked himself out as something of a clown. “I’d fall down. I’d tell jokes,” he recalled. “I liked the feedback. I loved making girls laugh. It felt good.” The attention he garnered from being funny was so exhilarating that he would spend three hours preparing a clever answer-machine message, ask his friends to critique it, then make it funnier.
His grades were mediocre but Perry excelled in theatre. “I did a production of Our Town at my school, and I think my dad was kind of hoping I wasn’t going to be good in it,” he recalled. “But I guess I was good. He bought me an acting book called Acting with Style, and the inscription read, ‘Another generation shot to hell’.”
He was also a gifted tennis player. Obsessive by nature, he practised several hours a day but when he moved to LA stopped playing because he wasn’t winning as much any more. After high school, Perry landed a succession of small parts in Charles in Charge, Growing Pains and Beverly Hills, 90210.
Perry had been drinking since the age of 14, starting with Budweiser and Baby Duck wine, but his addiction worsened under the “white-hot flame of fame” in Friends. He was drinking heavily during the first two series (never on set, he insisted) but after a jet ski incident while filming Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek in 1996 — his first big screen lead, in which he played a real estate developer — he became addicted to Vicodin, an opiate pain medication. By the end of series three of Friends he was ingesting 55 pills a day and faking migraines and back injuries to secure prescriptions from doctors. On Sundays he sometimes attended open-house events to search for drugs in the bathrooms.
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During series three, Perry was also starring in Almost Heroes, a film directed by Christopher Guest which, like Fools Rush In, bombed at the box office. Perry recalled throwing up “every 30 seconds” on set behind trees and rocks. His co-star Chris Farley was also a drug addict and when Perry learnt that he had died of a heroin overdose the day before the film was released, he punched a hole through the dressing room wall of his Friends co-star Aniston. He spoke publicly about Farley’s addiction but was still hiding his own from the cast of Friends and his family, even when he was admitted at the age of 26 to a rehab centre in Minnesota.
When he returned to the Friends set he began drinking (he later said that he could track the trajectory of his addictions by gauging his fluctuating weight from season to season — “when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills; when I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills,”). He always turned up on set but sometimes slurred his words; he recalled one scene in the coffee house when he fell asleep on the couch and was woken by LeBlanc moments before his line was due. Things came to a head when Aniston visited him in his trailer and told him the cast knew he was drinking because they could smell the alcohol on his breath.
“In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better,” Perry said. “This is what my co-stars on Friends did for me. There were times on set when I was extremely hungover, and Jen and Courteney Cox, being devoted to cardio as a cure-all, had a Lifecycle exercise bike installed backstage.”
Perry would spend most of his adult life struggling with alcohol and drugs. By the age of 49 he had gone to rehab 15 times, attended 6,000 AA meetings and had taken so many opioids that in 2019 his colon exploded from chronic constipation. At the time he was living in a “sober house” in southern California with his close friend and assistant, who he named only as Erin. He said that he treasured the friendship, and because Erin was gay it brought him “the joy of female companionship without the romantic tension that has seemed to ruin my friendships with straight women”.
On one occasion, after Erin rushed Perry to hospital from opioid overuse, he went into a two-week coma. He was given a 2 per cent chance of survival and spent nine months wearing a colostomy bag.
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Like many of the other cast members, Perry struggled to replicate the success of Friends, and he dedicated much of his life to beating his addiction. He transformed his Malibu home into a rehabilitation facility (the 5,500 sq ft beach compound was known as the Perry House) and he was a vocal advocate for rehabilitation as opposed to prison. In 2013 he challenged Peter Hitchens, the newspaper columnist, on Newsnight, arguing that addiction was an uncontrollable disease.
“I’ve had my own troubles in life, and you can’t help but use those as a springboard to try to become better or you sort of get lost in the darkness of it all,” Perry said in 2015. “My life is a lot less about myself now … So out of darkness comes light.”
Matthew Perry, actor, was born on August 19, 1969. He died of undisclosed causes on October 28, 2023, aged 54