About three weeks before my audition for Friends, I was alone in my apartment on Sunset and Doheny, tenth floor – it was very small, but it had a great view – and I was reading in the newspaper about Charlie Sheen. It said that Sheen was yet again in trouble for something, but I remember thinking, why does he care? He’s famous.
Out of nowhere, I found myself getting to my knees, closing my eyes tightly and praying. I had never done this before.
“God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.”
Three weeks later, I got cast in Friends. And God has certainly kept his side of the bargain. But the Almighty, being the Almighty, had not forgotten the first part of that prayer as well.
Now, all these years later, I’m certain that I got famous so I would not waste my entire life trying to get famous. You have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.
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When I read the script for Friends Like Us [the original title of Friends] it was as if someone had followed me around for a year, stealing my jokes, copying my mannerisms, photocopying my world-weary yet witty view of life. One character in particular stood out to me: it wasn’t that I thought I could play “Chandler”; I was Chandler.
But because it was the hot ticket of the season everyone was auditioning for it, and everyone, it seemed, decided that the part of Chandler was exactly like me and came to my apartment to ask me to help them with their auditions. There were times I just acted Chandler out for them and told them to copy what I’d done, so sure was I that it was the right way to play him. And still I would call my agents every three or four days begging for a chance.
At my own audition I broke all the rules. For a start, I didn’t carry any pages of the script (you’re supposed to carry the script with you when you read, because that way you’re acknowledging to the writers that it’s just a work in progress). But I knew the script so well by this point. Of course, I nailed it. Thursday, I read for the production company and nailed it, and Friday I read for the network. Nailed it again. I read the words in an unexpected fashion, hitting emphases that no one else had hit. I was back in Ottawa with my childhood friends the Murrays; I got laughs where no one else had.
The pilot season of 1994 had cast its final actor: Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing.
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We sat around the table and all met each other for the first time. That is, except me and Jennifer Aniston. Jennifer and I had met through mutual acquaintances about three years earlier. I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued too – maybe it was going to be something. Back then I got two jobs in one day – one was Haywire, an America’s Funniest Home Videos-type show, and the other was a sitcom. So I called Jennifer and I said, “You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to.”
Bad idea. I could feel ice forming through the phone. Looking back, it was clear that this made her think I liked her too much or in the wrong kind of way… and I only compounded the error by then asking her out. She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, “We can’t be friends!”
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Now, a few years later, ironically we were friends. Fortunately, even though I was still attracted to her and thought she was so great, that first day we were able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact that we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer.
Everyone else was new to me. Courteney Cox was wearing a yellow dress and was cripplingly beautiful. I had heard about Lisa Kudrow from a mutual friend, and she was just as gorgeous and hilarious and incredibly smart as my friend had said. Mattie LeBlanc was nice and a cool customer, and David Schwimmer had had his hair cut really short (he had been playing Pontius Pilate for his theatre troupe in Chicago) over his hangdog face and was incredibly funny right away; warm and smart and creative. After me, he was the guy who pitched the most jokes – I probably pitched ten jokes a day and two of them got in. They weren’t just jokes for me; I’d pitch jokes for everybody. I’d go up to Lisa and say, “You know, it might be funny if you tried to say this…” and she’d try it.
The director, Jimmy Burrows, was the best in the business too. He’d directed both Taxi and Cheers. He knew instinctually that job one for us was to get to know each other and generate chemistry.
Immediately, there was electricity in the air.
From that first morning we were inseparable. We ate every meal together, played poker… At the start, I was full-on the joke man, cracking gags like a comedy machine whenever I could (probably to the annoyance of everyone), trying to get everybody to like me because of how funny I was.
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Because, why else would anybody like me? It would take 15 years for me to learn that I didn’t need to be a joke machine.
That first afternoon we were assigned dressing rooms, which eventually didn’t matter because we were never in them. We were always together. As we all walked to our cars and said goodbye that first evening, I remember thinking, I’m happy.
This was not an emotion I was altogether used to.
That night I went to bed thinking, I can’t wait to get back there tomorrow. Next morning, as I drove from Sunset and Doheny over the Cahuenga Pass to the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, I realised that I was leaning towards the windshield as I drove. I wanted to be there.
That would be true for the next decade.
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Day two was big. We reported to a new building – Building 40 – for our first table read. I was nervous and excited, and yet confident too. I had always been good at table reads. But there was still the looming thought that anyone could be fired and replaced (Lisa Kudrow, for example, had originally been cast as Roz on Frasier but had been fired during the rehearsal process by none other than… Friends director Jimmy Burrows). If jokes didn’t land, or something was off, well, anybody could be replaced before they’d even properly found their way to their dressing room.
But I knew Chandler. I could shake hands with Chandler. I was him.
(And I looked a hell of a lot like him too.)
That day, the room was packed – in fact, it was standing room only. There were writers, executives, network people. There must have been 100 people in the room, but I was a song-and-dance man, and this is where I excelled. Before the table read began, we all went around the room introducing ourselves and saying what we did for the show. Then it was time to read. How would it go? Would the chemistry we’d only just started to create show up, or were we just six young hopefuls making believe that this would be our big break?
We needn’t have worried. We were ready, the universe was ready.
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We were pros – the lines flew out of our mouths. No one made a mistake. All the jokes landed. We finished to thunderous applause.
Everyone could smell money.
The cast could smell fame.
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Fairly early in the making of Friends I realised that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston. Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. And then I’d ask myself, how long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?
But that shadow disappeared in the hot glow of the show. (That, and her deafening lack of interest.)
On tape nights, nobody made a mistake. We might have run scenes over if a joke didn’t land – all the writers would huddle together and rewrite. But mistakes? Just never happened. So many shows have blooper reels, but there are only a few for Friends. From the pilot on… In fact, that pilot was error-free. We were the New York Yankees: slick, professional, top of our game from the very start. We were ready.
And I was talking in a way that no one had talked in sitcoms before, hitting odd emphases, picking a word in a sentence you might not imagine was the beat. I didn’t know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades. For now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance. (I was once told that the writers would underline the word not usually emphasised in a sentence just to see what I would do with it.)
We flew to New York on the Warner Bros jet for the “upfronts”. The upfronts are when a show is presented to the affiliates [local broadcasters]. It was on this trip that they told us the name of the show was now Friends (when they renamed it I thought it was a horrible idea; I never said I was a smart person), and Friends was a smash with the affiliates too. Everything was lining up. In New York we were celebrating, getting drunk, partying; then on to Chicago for more upfronts, more partying.
Then we had to wait a summer before the show first aired. I filled that summer with three notable things: gambling in Vegas at the behest of Jimmy Burrows; a trip to Mexico on my own; and a make-out session in a closet with Gwyneth Paltrow.
I was back in Williamstown, Massachusetts, when I met Gwyneth. She was doing a play there and I was visiting my grandfather. At some big party we slipped off into a broom cupboard and made out. We were both still unknown enough that it didn’t make it to the tabloids, but with that in mind, it fell to Jimmy Burrows to give me a reality check. After the upfronts it was clear the show was going to be a hit, so Jimmy flew us all to Vegas on the jet – we watched the pilot of Friends on the way – and, once we arrived, he gave us each $100 and told us to go gamble it and have fun.
“Your lives are going to utterly change,” Jimmy said, “so do some things in public now because once you’re as famous as you’re about to be, you’ll never be able to do them again”. And that’s what we did; we six new friends got drunk and gambled and wandered through the casinos, just six close strangers on a weekend trip, unknown to anyone, no one asking for autographs or photos, none of us being chased by paparazzi, a million miles from what was coming, which was every single moment of our lives being documented in public for all to see for ever.
I still wanted fame, but already I could taste a wild and weird flavour in the air – would fame, that elusive lover, really fill all the holes I carried around with me? What would it be like not to be able to put 20 on black in some harsh-lit casino, a vodka tonic in my hand, without someone shouting, “Matthew Perry just put 20 on black, everyone come and see!” This was the last summer of my life when I could make out at a party with a beautiful young woman called Gwyneth and no one, save Gwyneth and I, cared.
Would the payoff be worth it? Would giving up a “normal” life be worth the price paid, of people digging through my trash, clicking pictures through telephoto lenses of me at my worst, or best, or everything in between?
Would I ever again be able to anonymously replicate my 21st birthday, when I’d drunk seven 7 and 7 cocktails, poured a bottle of wine into a huge brandy snifter – you know, the one they put on the piano for tips – ordered a cab, gotten into the back of the cab with the snifter, still sipping the wine, tried to give directions to my home when I could only pronounce the letter L, only for the guy up front to yell, “What the f*** are you doing?” because he wasn’t a cab driver – it was just some random car?
Friends premiered on Thursday, September 22, 1994. It initially hit No 17 in the rankings, which was really good for a brand-new show. By episode six, we were a smash hit. Pretty soon we hit the Top Ten, then the Top Five, and we wouldn’t leave the top five for a decade. This is unheard of still.
So here it was – fame. Just as we’d predicted, Friends was huge, and I couldn’t jeopardise that. I loved my co-actors, I loved the scripts, I loved everything about the show… but I was also struggling with my addictions, which only added to my sense of shame. I had a secret, and no one could know. And even making the shows could be painful. As I admitted at the reunion in 2020, “I felt like I was gonna die if [the live audience] didn’t laugh. And it’s not healthy for sure. But I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh, and I would sweat and… and just, like, go into convulsions. If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out. I felt like that every single night.”
This pressure left me in a bad place; and I also knew that of the six people making that show, only one of them was sick.
I would give it all up not to feel this way. I think about it all the time. It’s no idle thought – it’s a cold-hearted fact. That Faustian prayer I made was a stupid one, the prayer of a child. It was not based on anything real.
But it became real. I have the money, the recognisability and the near-death experiences to prove it.
How I ended up dating the world’s biggest star – Julia Roberts
The day the actress turned up at my door – and what happened next
We’d hit the cover of People magazine and Rolling Stone magazine when both were a big deal. Now, the movie offers were coming in. Why would they not? I was getting anything I wanted. Million-dollar movie offer here, million-dollar movie offer there. I was no Julia Roberts, but there was only one of those.
Then something that only happens to famous people happened. Marta Kauffman, the Friends co-creator, approached me and said I should probably send flowers to Julia Roberts.
You mean the biggest-star-in-the-universe Julia Roberts? “Sure, great, why?” I said.
Turned out Julia had been offered the post-Super Bowl episode in season two and she would only do the show if she could be in my story line. Let me say that again – she would only do the show if she could be in my story line. (Was I having a good year or what?) But first, I had to woo her.
I thought long and hard about what to say on the card. I wanted it to sound professional, star to star. (Well, star to much bigger star.) But I wanted something a tad flirty in there too, to match what she had said. I’m still proud of what I settled on. I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read: “The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers.”
Not bad, right? I was afraid to go to sleep at night, but I could pour on the charm when called for. But my work here was far from done.
Her reply was that if I adequately explained quantum physics to her, she’d agree to be on the show. Wow. First of all, I’m in an exchange with the woman for whom lipstick was invented, and now I have to hit the books.
The following day, I sent her a paper all about wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle and entanglement, and only some of it was metaphorical. Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift: bagels – lots and lots of bagels. Sure, why not? It was Julia f***ing Roberts.
Thus began a three-month-long courtship by daily faxes. This was pre-internet, pre-cell phones – all our exchanges were done by fax. And there were many; hundreds. And it wasn’t like we weren’t both busy – I was shooting the most popular show on the planet and she was shooting a Woody Allen movie, Everyone Says I Love You, in France. (Of course she was.) But three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive. I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of ten, one had. They were so smart – the way she strung sentences together, the way she saw the world, the way she articulated her unique thoughts, all was so captivating. It was like she was placed on this planet to make the world smile, and now, in particular, me. I was grinning like some 15-year-old on his first date.
And we had never even spoken yet, much less met each other.
Then early one morning, something changed. Julia’s fax veered romantic. I called a friend and said, “I’m in over my head. You have to come over right away. Tell me if I’m wrong.”
When he arrived, I showed him the fax and he said, “Yup, you are not wrong. You are most certainly in over your head.”
“What am I supposed to send back?” “Well, how do you feel?” “Oh, f*** off,” I said. “Just tell me what to say.”
So, “Cyrano” and I compiled and sent a fax that veered romantic too. Then we stood there by the fax machine looking at each other. Two men just staring at a machine. After about ten minutes, the jarring sound of the fax machine – all bongs and whirrs and hissing messages from outer space – filled my apartment.
“Call me,” it said, and her phone number was at the bottom.
I picked up the phone and called Julia Roberts. I was nervous as hell, as nervous as my first appearance on Letterman. But the conversation went easy. I made her laugh and, man, what a laugh… She was clearly extremely smart, a big intellect. Her stories were so good, in fact, that at one point I asked her if she had written them out ahead of time. Five and a half hours later, as we came to a close, I realised I wasn’t nervous any more. After that we could not be stopped: five-hour conversations here, four-hour conversations there. We were falling; I wasn’t sure into what, but we were falling.
One Thursday, my phone rang again.
“I’ll be at your house at 2pm Saturday.”
Click. And there we had it.
How did she even know where I lived? What if she didn’t like me? What if the faxes and the phone calls were all really cute but when it came to real life, she didn’t want me any more? Why can’t I stop drinking?
Sure enough, at 2pm that Saturday, there was a knock on my door. Deep breaths, Matty. When I opened it, there she was, there was a smiling Julia Roberts on the other side.
I believe I said something like, “Oh, that Julia Roberts.” She asked me how I was doing.
“I’m feeling like the luckiest man in the world. How are you doing?”
“You should probably invite me in now.”
I did let her in, both figuratively and literally, and a relationship began. We would already be a couple by the time we started filming the Friends Super Bowl episode.
But before we filmed it, it was New Year’s Eve in Taos. It was about to be 1996. I was dating Julia Roberts. I’d even met her family. She picked me up in her orange Volkswagen Beetle after flying me there privately. I thought I had money. She had money.
We’d played football in the snow all day. Later, Julia looked at me, looked at her watch – 11.45pm – took my hand and said, “Come with me.” We jumped in this big blue truck and drove up a mountain, snow swirling around. I had no idea where we were going. We seemed to be heading up into the very stars themselves. Eventually we reached a mountaintop, and for a moment the weather cleared, and we could see New Mexico and beyond, all the way back to Canada. As we sat there, she made me feel like the king of the world. A gentle snow was falling, and with that, 1996 began.
In February, Julia went on Letterman and he pressed her on whether or not we were dating. To answer Letterman, Julia yet again proved her smarts by f***ing with everyone: “Yes, I’ve been going out with Matthew Perry, and for some reason, maybe because I did the Super Bowl show, people think it is the Matthew Perry from Friends. But, in fact, it’s this haberdasher I met in Hoboken. But Matthew Perry from Friends is nice too, so I don’t mind that mistake.” She also called me “awfully clever and funny and handsome”.
Two months later, I was single. Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. 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, unloveable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.
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On March 25, 2001, I’d been detoxing one night when the powers that be in rehab decided to give us all the night off to watch the Academy awards. I was lying there, sweating and twitching, filled with fear, barely listening, when Kevin Spacey stepped up to the podium and intoned: “The nominees for best performance by an actress in a leading role are: Joan Allen, in The Contender; Juliette Binoche, in Chocolat; Ellen Burstyn, in Requiem for a Dream; Laura Linney, in You Can Count on Me; and Julia Roberts, in Erin Brockovich.”
Then he said, “And the Oscar goes to… Julia Roberts!” As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry, pleading, filled with longing and tears. I made a joke.
“I’ll take you back,” I said. “I’ll take you back.”
The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now.
Extracted from Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry, published by Headline on November 1 (£25)
Shoot credits
Stylist Jordan Grossman at Celestine Agency. Hair Sierra Kener for 901 Artists. Make-up Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Oribe. Matthew Perry wears suit, Armani
