As an actor, Matthew Perry could never escape the shadow of Chandler Bing – the funny, vulnerable, sarcastic character he played for 10 years in Friends. But in his private life, Perry, who has died aged 54, was the victim of demons far more pernicious than typecasting. He struggled for much of his adult life with substance addiction – remarking in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, that he was lucky to be alive. “No one,” he commented, “would be surprised if I died.”
He will be remembered as a performer of searing comic timing. Awkward and anxious, Perry was the least conventionally starry of the Friends cast – but, in its first few years especially, Chandler’s deadpan hilarity was crucial to its success. In the early 1990s, sincerity was out, and irony was the dominant strain of humour – and, with the arguable exception of The Simpsons, nobody embodied that sensibility better than Perry’s Chandler. He was the needy, nerdy guy who depended on humour as a deflection and couldn’t get a girlfriend to save his life. We all knew somebody like that. If we didn’t, it was probably because we were that person.
Chandler was terrible at wooing the opposite sex – a quality he shared with Perry in his pre-celebrity days – and used cynicism as a defence mechanism. These were aspects of male vulnerability rarely seen on screen – and Perry made them authentic and hilarious.
Nobody did flailing ineptitude better, as demonstrated in the season one episode where Chandler ends up locked in an ATM lobby with a Victoria’s Secret model. He is delighted when she refers to him as “that guy” and then starts to unravel in the uncomfortable silence that follows. It could have been a weird scene. Perry makes it sweet and hilarious.
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His comedic gifts never deserted him, even as the success of Friends turned his life upside down. The son of a Canadian journalist mother and American actor father, Perry, who was born August 19th, 1969, was the archetype Gen X latchkey kid left to fend for himself while his boomer parents got on with their lives. In his memoir, he recalled how, as a child, he would fly unaccompanied from his mother’s home in Ottawa to his father in Los Angeles. He was an afterthought in their worlds – a contribution, surely, to the insecurities plaguing him as an adult.
He was already a heavy drinker by the time he was cast in a new sitcom, Friends Like US, in 1993. Its title later trimmed to Friends, the show became an instant smash – and quickly came to define the zeitgeist (and that was just Jennifer Aniston’s haircut). Friends captured what it was to be young and adrift in the early 1990s in a way no other show managed.
Yes, the characters’ Central Park apartments were unrealistically huge, their lifestyles too lavish for their earnings (although the tensions between pals on different income levels were explored in an early episode via the medium of a Hootie and the Blowfish concert). But it was the first show to celebrate the universal truth that, for a few blurry years in your 20s, your friends become your family. People couldn’t get enough of it.
The rest of the cast took the success of Friends in their stride. They were jobbing actors and seemed glad to have stumbled into a hit. For Perry, life was more complicated. He’d always been desperate to be liked. “At the start, I was full-on the joke man,” he said of his early years on Friends, “cracking gags like a comedy machine whenever I could ... trying to get everybody to like me because of how funny I was.”
Now he had global fame – and unlimited wealth, with Perry and the rest of the cast eventually earning $1 million each per episode. In 1997, three years into Friends, he was hurt in a jet ski crash and prescribed the painkiller Vicodin. He became addicted – and it began to impact on his performances. He recalled falling asleep on the Friends set, delivering his line on time only after Matt LeBlanc (Joey) nudged him awake. “No one noticed,” he said. “But I knew how close I’d come.”
Cycles of sobriety and addiction followed. Perry was on the wagon throughout Friends’ ninth season - when he delivered some of his strongest performances (such as his hilarious interaction with a door that “only cared about knock knock” jokes). But he couldn’t outrun those demons and he admitted to being devoid of feelings filming the final episode – during which co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox couldn’t stop crying (their tears at the end are real).
“I felt nothing; I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking or if I was just generally dead inside,” he wrote in his memoir. “So, instead of sobbing, I took a slow walk around the stage with my then-girlfriend.
“Friends had been a safe place, a touchstone of calm for me; it had given me a reason to get out of bed every morning, and it had also given me a reason to take it just a little bit easier the night before.”
Perry struggled to move on from Chandler. He tried to parlay Friends fame into a movie career. As with his Friends costar Aniston, he was initially cast in romcoms, appearing opposite Salma Hayek in 1997′s Fools Rush In. “There’s no chemistry, no spark, nothing to suggest any attraction between them,” lamented Empire. “It’s hard to imagine they’d exchange a few words on a bus, let alone share a night of passion”.
He had success with Bruce Willis in the Whole Nine Yards, in which he played a mild-mannered dentist who comes to the attention of the mob. It was a substantial hit, grossing more than $100 million, though a 2004 sequel, the Whole Ten Yards flopped. It was the last occasion Perry troubled the box office, though he drew on his own struggles in 2007′s Numb, playing a writer suffering from a depersonalisation disorder amid a heavy cannabis habit.
On the small screen, he was fantastic in Aaron Sorkin’s comedy-drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, where he played the showrunner on a Saturday Night Live-type comedy revue. Alas, Sorkin’s talky scripts weren’t for everyone. Studio 60 was cancelled after just one season.
That was the end of Perry as a serious actor. Instead, he fell deeper and deeper into addiction. He never married and ended his days alone. When he appeared on the 2021 Friends reunion, it was striking just how disengaged he seemed. His face was puffy, and he struggled to string together just a few coherent sentences (he explained he’d had “emergency dental surgery” the day before).
Twelve months later, he published his memoir – a book that is, in places, hilarious but whose defining mood is sadness. In the end, he was the clown whose life was framed by tears. “There were at last five women I could have married and had children with,” Perry wrote. “Had I done so, I would not now be sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with save a nurse, a sober companion and a gardener twice a week.”
