It was early evening in January 2016 and I was seated in a private booth at the Langham hotel in central London about to have dinner with Matthew Perry. He was in town to promote his forthcoming play The End of Longing, which he had written and was starring in. The initial plan had been to do a conventional interview in the theatre, but I had convinced Perry and his publicists that it would be a better interview and thus piece if we met in more relaxed surroundings. I was right — in the end Perry and I ended up talking for more than three hours and it was, he would tell me, the longest interview he had given.
Perry was dressed in a loose-fitting grey T-shirt and had his glasses pulled over his head. I remember the waiter gliding over to inform us of the menu and Perry asking if he could just have a cheeseburger. He was politely told he couldn’t.
The table had been booked in the name of Alvy Singer — the character Woody Allen plays in Annie Hall — and interviewing Perry did remind me in some ways of when I had previously interviewed Allen: both had such well-defined comic personas it was a shock to be reminded that they were not the roles that had immortalised them.
It is always dangerous and maybe foolish to judge anyone after only a few hours together — especially when for Perry the dinner was work — but if I had to sum up my impression of the man I met it would be that he was someone for whom unimaginable fame and success had not been accompanied with
happiness and fulfillment.
He came over as quite lonely. While we were eating, a car was parked outside waiting to take him to a casino. That was how he had passed his evenings while in London. He didn’t know the casino’s names or where they were. “I just go in cars and they take me to places,” he told me. When I asked if he was lonely he told me he had two assistants staying with him. It was telling, I remember thinking, that he mentioned assistants, but not friends.
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Friends was, of course, the show that made Perry globally famous and he was at his most entertaining and insightful talking about the lead-up to being cast as Chandler Bing and the ways that his life changed afterwards. He seemed properly shocked when I told him that 120 episodes of the series were aired in Britain each week. “It’s nice that it holds up,” he told me. “I get recognised by 14- year-olds who wonder why I look so old.”
The question of why Perry looked so visibly different in the show with his weight fluctuating wildly between series was answered when we learnt of his struggles with addiction. My dinner with Perry was a few years before he published his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, which went into harrowing detail about the alcoholism and painkiller/opiod addiction that led to him spending more than half of his life in rehab and treatment centres.
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His battles with alcohol and prescription drugs were, however, already well known even when we talked. “It has been very well documented that I have had alcoholism in my past,” Perry had told me. “I think it’s genetic. I have alcoholism in my family. Maybe being on a TV show that was that big and being in the public eye sped it up a lot, but a version of that would have happened.”
He talked openly about the impact of addiction on his life, but I remember trying to nudge him into saying something hopeful. If I am honest, I did have an agenda: I was so grateful for the pleasure he had given me and so many millions that I didn’t want to write a downbeat profile. He delivered, at least in terms of the quotes. “I don’t feel like it’s over for me” he told me. “I didn’t think I would be 46 and still single — my dream is meeting the right woman, settling down, having kids and being a family guy.”
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In the days leading up to meeting Perry I had both been filled with anticipation and anxiety — this was someone who had genuinely shaped how millions of us spoke and I worried that I would end up quoting Bing lines in a way that betrayed my fandom. In truth I was also slightly hoping he might throw a few original Perry quips back at me. All of which was an indication of my stupidity and Perry’s comic genius — in person and in the flesh Perry was not Bing. His pauses were longer and where Bing radiated an endearing lightness Perry exuded a dark and heavy energy. “I am less funny than I used to be,” he told me. “I’m definitely a darker soul than a lighter soul.”
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When the dinner was over, the bill had been settled and we were about to go our separate ways — me to my wife and young daughter and Perry to the casino I asked him if I should believe everything he had said about wanting to settle down and have a family. “I am being pretty truthful with you,” he said “you are getting the real me.” Later when friends asked me what Matthew Perry was really like I reminded them of the scene in the first series of Friends where Phoebe is dating Roger the psychologist. “You’re so funny,” he says to Chandler. “I wouldn’t want to be there when the laughter stops.” I guess that is where we all are now.
