“I wanted to be famous so badly,” Matthew Perry told the New York Times in 2002. “You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant.” He got all three. When he was found dead at his home at 54, the world remembered one line of work above the rest, a sarcastic New Yorker named Chandler Bing. The rest of the career is harder to summarise.
A tennis kid who switched to acting
Perry was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1969, and his parents split up before his first birthday. He grew up largely in Ottawa and became a top-ranked junior tennis player, practising up to 10 hours a day. At 15 he travelled to Los Angeles, was reunited with his father, an actor, and poured the same drive into acting. Leading roles in sitcoms came first: Second Chance in 1987, which was retitled Boys Will Be Boys the following year, then Sydney in 1990 and Home Free in 1993. His big-screen debut was as River Phoenix’s best friend in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon in 1988.
Chandler, and what came after
Friends began in 1994 and ran for 10 years. Its final episode drew more than 50 million viewers in the US. Perry described his character as “an exaggerated form of me”, a man who is “not comfortable in his own skin” and has “a great excuse to be funny”. Jennifer Aniston said in 1997 that Perry’s “feelings get hurt. He cares what people think.”
The film career he hoped for never quite arrived. He appeared in Fools Rush In in 1997, Three to Tango in 1999, and The Whole Nine Yards in 2000 and its sequel The Whole Ten Yards in 2003, both opposite Bruce Willis. So he stayed with television, and moved toward drama. A short run as Joe Quincy, a Republican lawyer, on The West Wing in 2003 was followed by Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip in 2006 and 2007. DW counts three Emmy nominations in all: one for Friends and two for his West Wing appearances.
Sitcoms followed. Mr Sunshine, his own idea, with Perry as a San Diego arena operations manager, was dropped after a short run in 2011. The next year he played a sportscaster named Ryan King in Go On. Later came Oscar Madison in a revival of The Odd Couple, from 2015 to 2017. In 2016 he wrote and starred in a play, The End of Longing, which opened in London’s West End.
The cost behind the laughs
Success never shielded him. In 1997 he spent 28 days in a Minnesota rehab clinic after becoming hooked on a painkiller following a jet-ski accident. Three years later he was hospitalised with pancreatitis, and in 2001 he abruptly left the set of Serving Sara to go back into rehab. By 2018, at 49, he had spent more than half his life in treatment centres, and that year an exploded colon, linked to opioid use, put him on life support and in a coma for two weeks. His 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, set it all down. “I had a secret and no one could know,” he wrote.
He had been free of drugs and alcohol for 18 months when Friends: The Reunion aired in 2021.
