Grieving Matthew Perry — Cultural Digest #15
No one wore the '90s so well as Chandler Bing.
In the backend of my Substack where all my drafts are hiding there’s a piece I’ve been working on for a while now about the lost gorgeousness of ‘90s men and wanting to pinch all of their wardrobes (not in a stalkery way you understand, in a very much “that’s chic as hell, I want to remodel my entire ‘look’ around those high-waisted, wide-legged trousers and turtle necks” kind of a way.) Of course it is a piece which heavily features Ross, Joey and Chandler — emphasis on Chandler, Season 2, second half, certainly as far as a lot of the fashion stuff goes and case in point, the excellent sweater pictured above. You should see the ‘pants’ it’s coupled with too, absolutely dreamy. Or maybe it was Matthew Perry that was dreamy and he just wore the hell out of that whole ensemble, like he shone in the ensemble he was born to be a part of.
There is so much to contend with in the world right now it seems almost immoral to pull focus to a celebrity death but for some reason seeing that Matthew Perry had died on Saturday, nigh on tipped me over the edge. I read it on Substack Notes whilst on a train, a modern kind of dismay, and audibly gasped so loud that the entire carriage looked up at me with genuine concern. I felt the echo of when I found out Heath Ledger had died in 2008 - I was on a tube that time and I saw it on the front of whichever newspaper was clutched in the hands of my neighbouring passenger - but back in 2023 I spent the rest of my journey on Saturday afternoon, feverishly trying to get online between stops whilst doing a very bad job at stopping myself from full on sobbing. I’m sure I will get to the ‘90s fashion and phwaorsomeness post in time by the way, but for now it has been superseded by my compulsion to write something in tribute to Matthew Perry.
The Friends cast have always been, as ageing would have it, about fifteen years + ahead of me (in Lisa Kudrow’s case almost twenty, though they all played a lot younger, of course) and so I came of age not quite with them but just after and looked to them for guidance: how to show up in relationships, friendships, dating, dress sense, a chosen career — that I guess in a pretty meta way, ended up being acting. But you name it they were integral to a sort of formative blueprint that I mapped out for my life — not all to the good necessarily, but still.
Last year, returning to the show almost twenty years after I’d lost interest - they started to leave behind their tempestuous twenties as I stumbled into the early efforts of mine - I fell head over heels back in love with it. I discovered that I’d never even seen how it started (Season 1) or ended (Seasons 8-10) and watched those later seasons in particular, in awe of its relentless whip-smart dialogue and the strength of the storylines that sustained it from beginning to triumphant end. It was only their relatability to my life that fell short back in the early ‘00s not the show’s scripts or performances, and since going through those life stages myself, they certainly don’t fall short any longer.
Not all of Friends stands the test of time - an obvious lack of NYC diversity and certain jokes definitely don’t land in this era, not to mention the old tech - but despite those things it’s still finding a new audience with Generation Netflix. I am as fanatical about Friends as anyone my age could be but there are literal teenagers in 2023 claiming it as their own. On the other end of the spectrum I’ve also seen a few people posting in the last few days (just to be contrary? I honestly don’t know) that they never really found Friends that funny.
(I actually searched ‘what do you call someone who’s being contrary for the sake of it?’ and someone had just written ‘an asshole’. Lol. Could this be more of a Chandler retort if it tried?)
But it really is a moot point. Friends is one of the most beloved television shows of all time. Next year will mark thirty years since it first aired and it has never left IMDb’s Top 100 TV shows since either’s creation (at the time of writing Friends ranked in 51st position with 1.1 million votes — for context, Succession ranks just above it in 49th position with 242k). It is rarely out of the Netflix Top 10 most watched shows in the UK (it’s definitely back there now) and it has never not been in global syndication (for repeats) on regular television since it began. It experienced record viewership in every single country that it aired in on the planet and it aired in pretty much every single country on the planet. Event Television they called it. When unified for a brief half hour, we all sat down at an agreed time to collectively enjoy the same thing week on week. The only way we can experience that now is if something is live. And thus, I defy any actor, writer, comedian, creative-type of my generation, who could claim to not be influenced by it - even if they are one of those rare people who was disinterested or hated it. That’s what something that’s part of the zeitgeist does and that’s a bunch of credentials that transcends a discussion of how ‘good’ something is or not in my fair opinion. I watch it. My mum watches it. My cousins’ teenage children watch it. It connected, it connects. (Oh and by the way I think it’s AWESOME.)
What is also singularly unique about Friends is that it is a true ensemble production. Other shows include ensembles, yes, particularly sitcoms - Parks and Recreation, the British Office, the US Office, I could go on - but they all have leading characters with the other cast members in supporting roles. Schitt’s Creek and Succession have come close in recent years but none of these shows ran for as long as Friends nor with their full leading casts intact. No other show can boast six leads all considered as important as one other, all with equitable screen time and storylines in every single one of its 236 episodes, all (eventually) on equitable salaries. They were also the last cast to meaningfully be rewarded financially for being in a successful TV show, one of the main issues of contention at the heart of the actor’s strikes (as if to amplify the message of strength in numbers? Each of them is said to receive an estimated $20 million a year from the global syndication of Friends on network and streaming services alone.) I guess the point I’m making is that you can’t name one of them without the other five and their names are so eponymous with ‘90s culture and beyond it, that we really are on first name terms. No one needs me to clarify to whom I was referring in the opening paragraph of this piece, nor if you were to casually mention any of them in the right context. No article references a couple of them, it is all of them together, always. That’s the actors themselves as well as the characters they embodied. They have become a timeless and tightly bound unit. They are a collective frozen in time. Which makes them immortals, I think. So what does that mean for all of those who come of age with them, when one of them suddenly slips away in a jacuzzi on a lazy Sunday afternoon?
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Normally I don’t engage with celebrity news. I find it invasive and crass for all the obvious reasons and probably all of the lesser known ones as well but seeing this news sent me into an absolute internet spiral. Perhaps because of the way I’d reconnected with Friends in the last year watching it front to back at least five times over. The HBO Max Reunion special I’d watched multiple times too. I’d spent hours on YouTube digging up behind the scenes footage reminiscing; past interviews; filmed photoshoots — honestly, anything I could get my hands on. Not long after that, came Matthew Perry’s book Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing prompting the release of a whole raft of new-old clips along with hours of interview footage with Perry himself. I watched every interview he did that was shared online from small soundbites of obvious promotion with Perry reading extracts from the book, to deeper long-form discussions where he opened up and answered achingly vulnerable questions. He said something so profound in one that it helped me to have a greater understanding of addiction than I ever have before — it was relatable in that it didn’t make me feel seen but it made me see him. It made me feel an overwhelming sense of compassion for his experience and others who endure the same.
"I lay in the grass and just was in heaven. I thought to myself, 'This must be the way that normal people feel all the time,' and I thought that at 14."
Matthew Perry’s articulacy on the subject of addiction was as rational as the addiction was its opposite. This fearsome intellect - the same that made him such an exemplary actor and comedian - so too is what made his struggle all the more unbearable to witness. It’s very rare to see someone so deftly shut down someone on Newsnight with humour and grace - an MP who was ignorantly patronising those affected by addiction. This is how Perry spent the better part of his post-Friends life — not living out his acting ambitions, but raising awareness about his experience with alcohol and drug abuse, to lessen the stigma around it. And he invited us in well before his own battle with it was over. He talked candidly about fame, too. His almost vampiric desire for it that led to an unwitting prayer declared just weeks before being cast in Friends and then later, how that desire betrayed him.
“'Please, God, make me famous. You can do anything you want to me; just make me famous’…
[But] fame does not do what you think it’s going to do, it’s a trick…
All these years later, I’m certain that I got famous so I would not waste my entire life trying to get famous. [But] you have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.
I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realize they are the wrong dreams.”
It is this self-awareness buttressed up so flushly against his own self-deprecation particularly as an actor that I do find enormously relatable to my own experience, not to mention his comments on the impact of fame. I can also obsess over stuff — I must have refreshed the Live Feed updates for a statement from the other five for two days straight. This was totally irrational I know, but I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. Like an addiction, I suppose. No matter who else came forward from the cast or creative team with a loving statement (incidentally an overwhelming number of people I thought, particularly exes, which says volumes) it was them I wanted to hear from. Not that they would say anything I wasn’t expecting to hear but because their experience would mirror mine. Where they were six, we were the seventh. They were the only ones who would truly get it. And you just sort of intuitively knew that their statement would be a collective one. How could it not be?
I don’t know that there’s another celebrity quite like Matthew Perry though, for whom the ravages of drug and alcohol abuse have continued to play out so late in life or perhaps who’s lived to tell the tale. He already confronted the possibility of his own death on multiple occasions too of course, the macabre opening line for his book reading:
Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.
And in a later chapter:
“It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.”
And then his greatest wish in the event of his death —
“When I die, I know people will talk about 'Friends, Friends, Friends.' And I’m glad of that, happy I’ve done some solid work as an actor, as well as given people multiple chances to make fun of my struggles on the World Wide Web…
“But when I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if 'Friends' were listed far behind the things I did to try and help other people. I know it won’t happen, but it would be nice.”
A few hours after learning of his death, I suddenly panicked about watching Friends again. I have a handful of ‘comfort’ shows that I watch on rotation of which Friends is probably the heaviest lifter. Might it be too hard? Too sad? I saw others posting the same online and immediately took a sharp intake of breath and ripped off the plaster.
Oh pals let me tell you, it made me feel as warm and comforted as apple crumble and custard in the way that only Friends can, maybe even more so now. And what Matthew Perry does in that show is a total gift. His natural pathos and melancholy is so close to the surface it’s what makes his performance all the more memorable. I won’t set him apart from his cast-mates though which is what I’ve seen a lot of journalists do in the last few days for some reason (not classy guys and also, inaccurate) they are all perfect because they are all perfect. That’s how a true ensemble operates.
I pulled up only slightly at the Thanksgiving episode in Season 9, The One with Rachel’s Other Sister (that I’d purposefully sought out to get it over with) where they fiercely debate who would take care of Emma in the event of Ross and Rachel’s untimely deaths. Later, Chandler breaks all of his and Monica’s wedding china and says “Well, whaddya know, I guess I’ll be the one who dies first.” Well, whaddya know. But in that moment I knew two things: one, that I will continue to watch Friends for as long as I live; and two, that whilst I have never heard someone speak about addiction with such clarity of purpose as Matthew Perry and that helping people is what he longed for his true legacy to be not Friends, I think amidst the joyful irony in making this declaration so soon before his own untimely death, he might just get to have both.
All speculation slowly being pieced together by those close to him that spoke to or saw him in the days and even hours before his passing points, almost prophetically towards a shocking but not surprising death. Surely, it must have been his health that failed him?
I remember when the first one of my school friend’s lost a parent a few years ago and the whole group of us fell to pieces in Greek chorus. We were as bereft as if we’d lost one of our own parents. It was strange but uniting, this foreshadowing of the grief and confusion that will eventually come for us all, paired with an arresting reckoning with our own mortality. So perhaps the least shocking thing about Matthew Perry’s loss, is that it should be felt so keenly and have such a wide reaching impact. The first Friend, the youngest of the six, the one who found it the hardest to exist in this world but in that struggle had finally discovered a reason for being and thus for many, defined a generation’s symbol of hope and funny — I hope, with every fibre of my being, that it was his body that surrendered in the end, and not his spirit.
I wrote a piece about rediscovering Friends back in April for anyone who would like to read it as a companion piece. I’ve also shared some great related articles below, as well as relevant resources for anyone who might need them including the interview with Matthew Perry from his book tour that invited me into his experience and radically altered the way I had previously understood those living with addictions.
I believe his book is pretty much sold out everywhere but you can order it here with a two week wait.
#6 Cultural Digest: Friends Like Us
UK Support
If you or someone you know would like to speak to someone about addiction or substance abuse, you can seek confidential help and support 24/7 from Frank, by calling 0300 123 6600, texting 82111, sending an email or visiting their website here.
US Support
In the US, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration can be reached at 1-800-662-HELP.
Articles of Note
Washington Post - The Curse of A Wish Come True
Hollywood Reporter - Casting Chandler
The Guardian - How Matthew Perry captured the spirit of an age
Hollywood Reporter - "Like when a Beatle dies"
Interview with Matthew Perry
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