After his tragic death in October 2023, more and more details have come out about
actor Matthew Perry's life. As famous and respected of a figure as he was,
these are some of the lesser-known pieces of Perry's history.
Matthew Perry had a number of high-profile relationships after he became a household name,
but the TV star never married. In November 2020, he proposed to literary manager Molly Hurwitz.
The couple began dating in 2018, and Perry expressed his affection for Hurwitz clearly
while speaking to People by calling her "the greatest woman on the face of the planet."
Despite this praise, their relationship did have its rocky moments. In May 2020,
InTouch reported that the two had even broken up with a source revealing to
the outlet that the separation was perfectly civil. Evidently,
they remained on good enough terms to get engaged six months later, but their reunion did not last.
In June 2021, Perry confirmed in a statement provided to People that he
and Hurwitz had completely called off their engagement. He said,
"Sometimes things just don't work out and this is one of them. I wish Molly the best."
Matthew Perry's struggles with addiction significantly impacted
his time on Friends. While being on one of the biggest TV shows of all time may
sound like an entirely unforgettable experience, Perry admitted during a
2016 BBC Radio 2 appearance that many of his memories of the show are hazy.
When asked to name his least favorite Friends episode,
for example, the actor came up short, joking that the episodes he likes least
are the many he has no recollection of filming between season 3 and 6.
Perry tried to keep his addiction struggles off of his coworkers' radars to no avail. The
actor told People in 2013 that his main vices were pills and alcohol,
and that at the height of his addiction he was unable to stop consuming them.
"The rest of my life has been battling this disease."
He admitted that these habits spiraled so heavily that all of his co-stars eventually
became aware of them. He touched on this again in a 2022 interview with GQ, saying,
"The cast of Friends knew. Jennifer Aniston took me aside once and said, 'We know you're drinking,'
And I said, 'How do you know?' And she said, 'We can smell it." And that didn't stop me."
Friends had a number of high-profile guest stars, including Oscar winner Julia Roberts. However,
what a lot of people might not know is that Matthew Perry was
pretty much responsible for getting the Pretty Woman actor on the show.
Roberts appeared in Season 2 episode "The One After the Superbowl." The two-part episode,
which aired after Super Bowl XXX, raked in 52.9 million viewers,
becoming the most-watched installment of the entire series.
As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, it was Perry who asked Roberts to come on the show. In his
memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry recalled that Roberts informed
him that she would only appear on the show if he wrote her an essay about quantum physics.
"Right now, right here?"
Surprisingly, the very next day Perry sent over the paper, successfully convincing Roberts to
appear in the episode. And speaking of science, it sounds like the two had real chemistry as
Perry and Roberts began dating in 1995. However, Perry's own insecurities got the better of him,
and he ended up calling things off with the movie star in 1996. He wrote in his memoir,
"I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me — why would she
not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable."
As we previously noted, Matthew Perry struggled heavily with addiction to alcohol and Vicodin
throughout his life. Finding sobriety was an arduous, years-long journey,
but he persisted despite the challenges. Eventually, as Perry explained to People,
he finally found the help he needed. Once he was in recovery, he turned to advocacy
and began a lifelong dedication to helping those grappling with similar substance use problems.
Additionally, Perry was a vocal advocate for drug courts, which
would grant non-violent addicts treatment rather than imprisonment. Through his work,
Perry said that he finally found, quote, "true happiness" and a sense
of fulfillment that wasn't always a part of his life. As he explained to People,
"The interesting reason that I can be so helpful
to people now is that I screwed up so often. It's nice for people to
see that somebody who once struggled in their life is not struggling anymore."
Helping others deal with their own addiction was near and dear to Matthew Perry,
and he even jumped into the political world to
amplify his cause alongside the National Association of Drug Court Professionals.
According to the organization's website, Perry, NADCP CEO West Huddleston, and other NADCP board
members went to Washington, D.C. to meet with members of Congress to discuss drug
court funding in 2011. The group met with the House Appropriations Committee to advance the
support for the drug courts, and pushed the committee to consider an $86 million budget.
"Drug courts are a wonderful solution to the ever-growing
problem of addicts being caught up in the criminal justice system."
In pure Chandler Bing fashion, Perry cracked a couple jokes while speaking on the issue,
but given the subject matter, he got to the seriousness of the topic fairly quickly.
In his speech, Perry highlighted the many social and financial benefits of drug courts,
and adamantly advocated for Congress to provide them the funding they needed.
Matthew Perry became a Hollywood A-lister thanks to Friends,
but his acting career began way before the sitcom hit the small screen. When he was 15 years old,
he moved to Los Angeles where his dad, another actor, resided.
Evidently, Perry wasted no time in getting into the acting game. He
landed guest spots on shows like Charles In Charge while he was still a teen,
and even scored a main role on the short-lived series Second Chance.
What's more, Perry got his first film gig from a chance encounter. As he recounted
to the Los Angeles Times, he happened to be at a restaurant when the movie's director
reached out to say he could be a good fit for a film he was working on. Thanks to this run-in,
Perry made his film debut in 1988's A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. The film wasn't
a commercial or critical hit, but it did give Perry a chance to act opposite River
Phoenix. It also lulled Perry into a false understanding of success. He explained,
"We had a lot of fun, but I was so young and naive. I thought,
'This is where the big stardom starts.'"
In May 2021, the Friends reunion hit HBO Max. All six members of
the beloved sitcom's main cast got back together to look back on the show that
forever changed their lives. While the well-received reunion probably sparked
the desire for a full-on reboot in the hearts of many fans, Perry made it clear he was not
into the idea of bringing back the sitcom's characters for any project in that vein.
As he explained to ABC News in 2013, his main source of reluctance on this
front was that he didn't want to risk casting the iconic series in
a negative light. Proud of the work he and his castmates did, the thought of reuniting
only for the product to be anything but great was too much to bear for Perry.
Despite his lack of interest in a Friends revival or reboot, the actor still channeled his inner
Chandler Bing from time to time. On Instagram, Perry regularly posted about his iconic character,
whether he poked fun at Chandler's hilarious dance moves, posted montages of some of his
classic looks from the show, and even shared a photo of his infamous bunny costume.
It's safe to say that Perry had a huge appreciation for his character and the show,
so it's natural that he wanted to leave Chandler's legacy as clean as possible.
As a fine actor with a strong sense of humor and a generous heart, it's no wonder
that Matthew Perry connected romantically with some of Hollywood's biggest stars. In addition
to his brief fling with the legendary Julia Roberts, InTouch reports that Perry was later
connected to Yasmine Bleeth from Baywatch. This was a particularly poignant pairing,
as his character on Friends had a canonical obsession with the actress as well.
"That's Yasmine Bleeth. She's a completely different kind of chick."
Perry was also involved with a few of his co-stars. He dated Lauren Graham of Gilmore
Girls fame, with whom he appeared in The Odd Couple. The pair had worked together on a number
of other occasions, and ultimately tried to see if their chemistry worked off-camera in 2003.
One of Perry's most significant relationships,
however, was with Lizzy Caplan, who played Janis Ian in the hit movie Mean Girls.
Perry and Caplan were a couple for about six years, but ended their relationship in 2012.
Fans of Friends and true crime may be particularly excited to learn that Matthew
Perry was the stepson of renowned journalist and Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison. In a 2020
chat with People, Morrison, who married Perry's mom in 1981, gushed about his stepson, saying,
"He's one of those people who always is the center
of the room for a reason and it was so as a kid. [...] He's an intense, talented,
focused character. He's very bright. That was always the case as he was growing up."
Calling his stepson "talented" and "smart," Morrison continued
by saying that he was not at all shocked that Perry landed his role in Friends,
saying that Chandler's personality perfectly aligned with who Perry was in reality.
On an episode of Watch What Happens Live, Morrison told host Andy Cohen
that Perry was a great person who also had an incredibly generous side.
"What's the best holiday or birthday gift Matthew's ever
given you?" "He gave me — uh, he gave me a car."
With praise like Morrison's, it's hard to imagine anyone else playing Chandler Bing in Friends.
However, it turns out that Matthew Perry wasn't always the actor in mind for the role. Two and
a Half Men star Jon Cryer was in the running, as well as Perry's friend at the time, Craig Bierko.
According to Perry's memoir, Bierko ultimately went with another series that didn't quite take
off, and evidently resented Perry for years after the fact. Director and actor Jon Favreau was also
offered the gig, but according to Vulture, he too turned it down to pursue other projects.
Though he wasn't a part of the main cast, Favreau did make an appearance on Friends,
briefly playing Monica Geller's wealthy boyfriend
Pete Becker. Favreau played the role in a guest capacity for a six-episode arc.
It seems like every actor has to pay their dues at some point in their early career,
and Matthew Perry was no exception. Perry suffered a number of setbacks in his early acting years,
and by the time he joined the cast of Friends he had several failed shows under his belt.
Perry's first sitcom appearance was in 1987 in the previously mentioned Second Chance. It was
about a man, played by Kiel Martin, who dies and gets the opportunity to come back and coach his
younger self. Perry played the younger version of Martin's character. The show was not a hit,
so it was reworked and renamed Boys Will Be Boys. The new version of the series,
which followed Perry's character and ditched the whole death element, sadly didn't stick either.
Perry later tried to go for sitcom success again with the show Home Free,
but that series was also canceled after a few months. Before arriving at success with Friends,
Perry was also tied to the show LAX 2194, which never even made it to the screen.
Growing up, Matthew Perry was a bit of a troublemaker in school. In addition to smoking
and cracking jokes in class, the Canadian-American television star also got into a schoolyard fight
or two. In one of these spats, he actually faced off against future prime minister Justin Trudeau.
At the time of this altercation, Trudeau's father, Pierre Trudeau, was the prime minister of Canada,
and Perry's mother, Suzanne Morrison, was the press secretary under his administration.
Unfortunately, though, this unique link did little to help the two boys get along.
Perry later recounted in his memoir that he, quote,
"beat up" the would-be prime minister, and joked that he only decided to end
their conflict when Trudeau gained the power of the Canadian military. Even so,
whatever bad blood existed between the two eventually became water under the bridge.
Shortly after Perry died on October 28, 2023, the Canadian prime minister took to X,
formerly known as Twitter, to mourn the loss of his onetime classmate. Trudeau wrote,
"Matthew Perry's passing is shocking and saddening. I'll never forget the schoolyard
games we used to play, and I know people around the world are never going to forget the
joy he brought them. Thanks for all the laughs, Matthew. You were loved — and you will be missed."