Actor Matthew Perry, known throughout the world thanks to his role as Chandler Bing, the sarcastic office worker and boyfriend of Monica Geller in the television comedy Friends, was found dead this Saturday. This has been exclusively confirmed by TMZ, which states that the Los Angeles (California) police found him drowned in his jacuzzi after 4:10 p.m. He was 54 years old. The police department has confirmed that it is investigating his death.
It was becoming the funny, ironic, amorous and sometimes irascible Chandler Bing during the 234 episodes that aired. Friends —between 1994 and 2004—which gave Perry global fame at just 24 years old, thanks to her colleagues Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc. He had already been in the world of acting for almost a decade, but it was thanks to the series that he achieved a level of fame that, in fact, continued to pursue him until the end of his days. Since he finished the fiction, Perry participated in some minor projects or in individual chapters of The good wife either CougarTown.
When he began recording the series, he consumed alcohol and drugs, as he himself said, but when he finished it, at 34, “he was already in a lot of trouble.” He went through physical changes that were evident to viewers and acknowledged that his teammates always helped him. His life was full of chiaroscuro, as he shared in his biography Friends, lovers and that terrible thing (Backlight, November 2022). “There were years when I was sober during that time. The ninth season was the year I was sober all the time,” he said in it. That was the first time he was nominated for an Emmy. In recent seasons he weighed 58 kilos, and took 55 pills of Vicodin, a painkiller derived from a synthetic opiate, every day. “I didn’t know how to stop. I couldn’t stop because the disease and addiction are progressive. So it was getting worse as I got older.” His relationship with substances was such that, as he told BBC2, there are three entire seasons of the series that he does not remember. “Between the third and sixth season I was a bit gone. “They were difficult years,” he acknowledged.
The actor also said in his memoirs that he went through rehabilitation programs on several occasions. In fact, he said that he had spent “nine million dollars or so” on rehabilitation. At times all of this had made him feel mocked, singled out and stigmatized. “My case suggests that there is still a huge stigma around addictions, and that we still have to hide,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “I’m shy,” he explained in another interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “But being in a series that is seen by 30 million viewers made people find out about my problem. That is why the existence of clinics that isolate you from the entire environment that does not favor you is so important.”
In that book he also said that in 2018 his colon burst and that he spent two weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital, in addition to having to live attached to a colostomy bag for nine months. He had a 2% chance of surviving. “They put me on something called an ECMO machine, which makes your heart and lungs work,” the actor wrote. “It was a desperate remedy. Nobody survives that.”
In the mid-nineties, Perry dated Julia Roberts. They met in her cameo in the series, in the Thanksgiving double episode of the second season, in which she played an old schoolmate and precisely Chandler’s new romance, and which then became the most seen of it with 53 million viewers. The chemistry went further and they dated between 1995 and 1996. Afterwards she spent a season with Yasmine Bleeth, one of the stars of The Baywatch. He also had short romances with Neve Campbell (from the saga scream), Lauren Graham (Gilmore Girls) or Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex). He himself stated in an interview in 1997 with Entertainment Weekly: “If you have dinner with someone the next day, the entire country will think you have a girlfriend, which is a bit strange. I was already lost about dating before Friends. So this makes it even more confusing. But in the worst case scenario, I have the best job in the world.” In 2019, Perry began a relationship with 27-year-old literary agent Molly Hurwitz, to whom he became engaged in 2020. They called off the engagement in 2021.
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