Matthew Perry is not an easy interview. When I flew out for The Sunday Times to Los Angeles in 2006 for his big post-Friends drama, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, created by the scriptwriting legend Aaron Sorkin, I was set a number of bizarre conditions. The strangest involved us hiding behind a building on the Warner Bros studio lot with a publicist until his personal PR gave a signal. At which point, we were to walk past him to the next building so he could look at us and decide if he would grant the interview.
Just before we walked, the wry New York studio publicist turned to me and said: “Stephen. Seriously. This is just television. No one is going to get killed.” But we walked, he approved, we all sat down and his PR said: “Oh by the way, no questions about Friends.”
Perry’s most recent interview, as part of the long-awaited Friends reunion last month, proved equally unsettling. As he spoke to the host, James Corden, surrounded by his five former colleagues from the 1990s sitcom, and reminisced about his career-defining role as the wise-cracking Chandler, fans flooded social media with their worries that he looked unhappy, dazed, unwell, and his speech seemed slurred.
The Friends producer Kevin Bright stepped in with some supportive comments which proved less than reassuring, suggesting Perry had had “emergency dental work” on the day of filming. “He seems stronger and better since the last time I saw him,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “What people say is what people say. I don’t have any[thing] to say about that, except it was great to see him. And I think he’s very funny on the show.”
Last week the 51-year-old’s fortunes took another knock when he announced that he had split from his fiancée, Molly Hurwitz, a 29-year-old talent manager. The pair had been dating since 2018 and got engaged in November 2020.
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This may be connected to another hit last month, when a Los Angeles-based personal assistant called Kate Haralson posted a FaceTime video of a chat she had had with Perry on TikTok after the two met on a dating app last year. Haralson, then 19, tells Perry he’s a year older than her father; he invites her over — providing it’s after she gets a Covid test.
In previous interviews across the course of his chequered career, Perry has tended to blame one person for his many misfortunes: himself. “I wanted to be famous so badly,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant. I didn’t think what the repercussions would be. For me it lasted about eight months, this feeling of ‘I’ve made it, I’m thrilled, there’s no problem in the world.’ And then you realise that it doesn’t accomplish anything, it’s certainly not filling any holes in your life.”
Certainly in my 2006 interview with Perry, in a heavily air-conditioned room next door to the former Friends studio, he seemed weary and downbeat. As the conversation struggled to take off, I asked if he actually wanted Studio 60 to be a hit given his reluctance to do press promotion.
He paused, slumped precariously on a stool, and stared at his feet. “I’ve been on the least-watched show in the history of television [Second Chance, in 1987] and the most-watched [Friends], and none of it really did what I thought it was going to do to my life,” he said eventually. “I guess if I was paying attention then maybe I’d think this has to be as successful as my last show, but I just have not and will not sign up to that kind of thinking. Plus, I’m too exhausted.”
He was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and his parents divorced when he was a baby. “I was one. So I didn’t blame myself quite yet. But . . .” he said in 2004. His Canadian mother, a former press aide to the prime minister Pierre Trudeau, returned to Ottawa with her son while his father, actor John Bennett Perry, moved to Los Angeles, where he had recurring roles in various police shows.
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Perry was always obsessive. As a junior tennis player he practised for ten hours a day, and he got such a hit from the laughter of friends and family that he would take three hours to prepare a clever answering machine message, ask friends to critique it and then spend another three hours making it funnier. “I needed to succeed at whatever I was doing so I could feel better about myself,’’ he said.
He started drinking at 13 and moved to Hollywood to be with his father at 15. That was where his dreams of becoming a tennis pro ended. “I was nationally ranked in Canada when I was 13 but then I moved to Los Angeles and everyone in LA just killed me,” he told Men’s Health magazine in 2012. “I went for acting instead.”
He worked on a series of unsuccessful shows before landing Friends in 1994, the youngest cast member at 24. The creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane interviewed each of the stars before the pilot episode and worked elements of their real character into the parts they played. Perry told them he hated silences, always filled them with a joke, was awful with women and had really bad relationship problems.
His romantic history backs this up. He dated Julia Roberts for a year after she guest starred on Friends, then had a string of short-term flings, including with the Baywatch actress Yasmine Bleeth — one of Chandler’s crushes in Friends — and Neve Campbell, whom he starred alongside in the 1999 film Three to Tango.
The stress of stardom and the holes it didn’t fill meant he soon found himself using alcohol to relax. He landed a part in the film Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek in 1996 and had to stop the car on the way into the first day’s shooting to nearly throw up on the side of the road. A jet-ski accident in 1997 led to a prolonged addiction to the painkiller Vicodin. He was hospitalised with pancreatitis in 2000.
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“[Friends] was actually a very lonely time for me because I was suffering from alcoholism,” he told the BBC. “I don’t remember three years of it. I was a little out of it at the time — somewhere between seasons three and six.”
His erratic behaviour caused problems for the Friends team. “Hard doesn’t even begin to describe it,’’ co-star Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe, told The New York Times. “When Matthew was sick, it was not fun. We were just hopelessly standing on the sidelines. We were hurting a lot.”
One former publicist for NBC, the channel that aired Friends in America, recalls the manager at the New York Yankees baseball stadium calling her after Perry booked the broadcaster’s corporate box for a game and turned up with three women to party so hard neighbouring box-holders complained. “It was like he was on self-destruct,” she recalls. “It wasn’t our job to babysit him, but he got himself into so many scrapes that we sometimes had to.”
After Friends, Perry struggled to find successful projects. Studio 60 was cancelled after the first season, and his movie career floundered after he left the set of the 2002 film Serving Sara to check into rehab. His most successful non-Friends TV project was three seasons of a sitcom based on the movie The Odd Couple, with Perry playing Walther Matthau’s slovenly Oscar Madison. But with the Friends cast having secured a $1 million per episode salary for the final two seasons, his net worth was estimated at $80 million by Business Insider in 2018.
It seems money may be a little tighter these days. Until last month, Perry had been offering fans personalised 20-second messages for $999 on the celebrity site Cameo. In one, leaked to gossip site Perez Hilton, he proposed to Nicole on behalf of Tony. “He clearly needs help so here I am,” Perry says in the video, recorded on a mobile phone, his voice hoarse and slurring just a little. “He’s a bit nervous so I hope you guys have a wonderful engagement — if you say yes — and a wonderful marriage. Tony, you sound like a great guy. You deserve a great girl like Nicole.”
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He has drifted in and out of rehab over the years, and once squared up to the journalist Peter Hitchens on Newsnight when the latter questioned whether addiction was a genuine illness. Producers had to usher the two out through separate doors. Throughout this, the relationships have continued: with the actress and former professional tennis player Maeve Quinlan from 2002 to 2003, Gilmore Girls star Lauren Graham in 2003, former fashion student Rachel Dunn from 2003 until 2005, and Mean Girls star Lizzy Caplan for six years until 2012. Instagram pictures posted last week by Perry in which he promotes Chandler-themed merchandise — hoodies and T-shirts with phrases such as “Could I BE any more vaccinated?” — alongside his longtime assistant BriAna Brancato prompted speculation the two might be dating.
In a 2004 interview, he discusses the temptation to tell the media the truth about the effects of fame on his life. “I’ve always wanted to go on The Tonight Show,” he explained. “[The host] Jay [Leno] says, ‘So, how you doing?’ And I go, ‘Not good.’ And just really tell the truth . . . ‘To tell you the truth, Jay, I have no idea which end is up and down in my life any more.’”
