It’s been three years since Matthew Perry was found dead in his Los Angeles home — a tragedy that struck both Hollywood stars and devoted fans of the hit NBC sitcom Friends.
Authorities later revealed that Perry, 54, drowned in his hot tub due to the “acute effects of ketamine” in his system. His death triggered a lengthy criminal investigation that saw Perry’s live-in assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, his dealer Jasveen Sangha — often known by clients as the “Ketamine Queen” — and three others sentenced to multiple years in federal prison for providing Perry with the drugs. It was a devastating ending for an actor who had a life-long issue with substance abuse and was celebrated for his frank and honest revelations about his struggle.
Perry was best known for his role on Friends playing the acerbic and awkwardly charming Chandler Bing, a character that permanently shot him into the public eye. But many of his closest confidants remained firmly out of the spotlight and say the public was rarely aware of what was really happening in Perry’s inner circle and private life. Now, in a new three-part Netflix docuseries The One About Matthew Perry, they’re sharing never-before-heard stories about knowing and loving Perry.
None of the friends cast — Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, or Courtney Cox — participated in the documentary, but director Mary Robertson worked with many of Perry’s childhood friends and family, including his sister Mia Perry Bowick, who’s speaking publicly for the first time. The series charts Perry’s path from a child of divorce to a budding Hollywood actor to an overnight sensation, told through first-person interviews, archival footage and photos, and narration from Perry himself taken from past interviews and the audiobook of his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
“Ever since Matthew became Matthew Perry, I was always really afraid of and really skeptical of ever talking to anybody about my experience with him. And there’s certainly been a lot of opportunities,” Perry Bowick says in the docuseries. “But I have a lot to say about what happened. All great stories have comedy and tragedy in them. And that certainly was Matthew’s story.”
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Here are six things we learned from The One About Matthew Perry.
Matthew Perry was the final cast member hired for Friends
By 1993, Perry, then in his early twenties, had been a working actor for several years but was still desperate for a breakout moment on screen. In the midst of auditioning, he came across a script titled “Friends Like Us,” which included a character named Chandler, who he said felt identical to him and “lept off the page.” He was desperate for a chance to make the character his own.
Perry said in a later interview that so many of his friends auditioned for the role of Chandler that he was actually well prepared by the time his agent secured him an audition. “I was very familiar with the script and very familiar with the character because a lot of my friends had been calling and saying, ‘There’s this guy on this show that is you. Can you help me with the audition?’” he said. “So much so that I knew all the material when I went in.”
Warren Littlefield, former president of NBC Entertainment, explains in the docuseries that the rest of the cast — Aniston, Kudrow, Schwimmer, LeBlanc, and Cox — were already signed on to the show. They were just missing one more star.
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“There was anxiety because all of the casting was fairly easy except for the role of Chandler
With all the excitement, there was ‘Holy shit, where’s Chandler Bing?’ And then Matthew Perry came into the room,” Littlefield says. “He just nailed it. It was just like, ‘Where’s this guy been?”
Perry had his first audition on a Wednesday. On Monday, the entire cast had their first table read.
Fame exacerbated Perry’s struggles with mental health
After its Sept. 1994 premiere, Friends became a surprise hit. The theme song, “I’ll Be There for You,” by the Rembrandts, charted on the Hot 100 in 1995 and each of the cast members became stars. Fame was exciting for Perry. But while friends and family say Perry was initially ecstatic about the attention, it quickly took over his life. “I was extremely happy to be famous. And then six months in, I was like ‘Uh oh. This didn’t fix what’s inside me,’” Perry said in an interview. “This didn’t do what I thought it was gonna do.”
Two of his closest childhood friends — Roger Castillo and David Pressman — describe watching Perry’s life change overnight as incredibly jarring. They were still close friends, but often had difficulty processing the reality of Perry’s place as a public figure. In 1996, movie star Julia Roberts guest starred on Friends and began dating Perry. When Perry and Roberts attempted to hang out with Castillo and Pressman, paparazzi swarmed the area. Eventually, Roberts and Perry went outside and posed so the photographers would take their photos and then leave. This kind of constant attention quickly became the norm.
“In the beginning I think he liked the fame,” Perry Bowick, Perry’s sister, says in the docuseries. “But at some point it did start to shift.”
In his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry noted that his complicated relationship to fame and suddenly being a person in the public eye exacerbated his existing struggles with mental health. There were feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness that he thought fame would fix. They didn’t.
Parts of Perry’s narration of his memoir also play in the docuseries. In one chapter of the book, he recalls early in his career his desperation getting so bad that he got on his knees on the floor of his apartment and prayed, “God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.”
“Three weeks later, I got cast in Friends,” Perry wrote. “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.”
Perry always had addictive tendencies. A freak accident made everything worse
Perry’s early childhood was defined by constant travel. His mother was Suzanne Morrison, who worked as a former press secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his father, John Bennett Perry, was an actor best known for his work on Old Spice commercials, Indepdence Day, and George of the Jungle. Perry’s parents were divorced when he was only one, and his mother married broadcaster Keith Morrison. Perry was raised traveling between his mother’s home in Canada and his father’s in California. When he was 14 years old, he had alcohol for the first time.
“I was in heaven,” Perry said. “And I thought to myself, ‘This must be the way normal people feel all the time.’”
His friends, Castillo and Pressman, describe drinking at parties when they were teenagers, often playing games, talking, laughing, and having fun. But they didn’t realize until they were older that Perry was most likely drinking more than them. Another close childhood friend, Marjorie Harris Newman, recalls one incident where the two drove home together after one of the above parties and got into an accident. When they got out of the car, she realized that Perry had been driving drunk.
“Later on I learned how secretive he was with the drinking — that he would drink by himself,” Newman says in the docuseries. “Alcohol probably quieted that very deep part of himself. And I think he felt becoming famous would fill that hole.”
While Perry was filming the 1997 rom-com Fools Rush In, he drove a jet ski and accidentally launched himself into the air, hurting his back. He was prescribed Vicodin and quickly developed a dependence.
“I had no idea what was going on. A doctor gave me a pill in a package and said take this when you’re done shooting. I did and then I felt this incredible euphoria. So why wouldn’t I take more?” he said in an interview. “I started to feel sick when I wasn’t taking them. Then you take three. Then you take four.”
After the film’s premiere, he went to rehab for the first time. Addiction would affect Perry for the rest of his life. The actor entered and exited rehab, but his filming schedule invited constant relapses. While filming The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis in 1999, actor Kevin Pollack remembers that he was unable to keep up with Perry’s drinking after hours. The crew would party on a private floor they called “Club Willis”
Jonathan Lynn, the film’s director, said that Perry was clearly struggling on set. “He would keep it under control as long as the work was going really well,” Lynn says in the docuseries. “But if anything went wrong or he felt like it wasn’t working, he would immediately turn to alcohol and pills. On all the films I’ve made, there’s always been a few people who drank a bit too much. But this was different.”
When Friends ended, Perry struggled to find another hit show. He turned his frustration into a dedicated advocacy career.
When Friends ended, Perry’s friends all say the actor was excited to work on more projects — especially since he believed that staying employed and focused helped him stay sober.
Shortly after Friends ended, he was cast in Aaron Sorkin’s television series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which was expected to be a hit following the success of Sorkin’s West Wing. But the show was cancelled after one season. In 2011, he created the ABC comedy Mr. Sunshine, starring as Ben Donavan, the overworked manager of a regional arena.The show was cancelled mid-season.
After these failures, Perry was in and out of rehab once again. But he left these programs with a renewed focus on drug policy reform and recovery advocacy. He turned one of his homes into a sober living center for men in recovery. He was outspoken about addiction awareness and even wrote and starred in a play, The End of Longing, based on his own struggle with substance abuse — all while continuing to act in one-off film and television projects.
“When he was sober, there was no greater positive influence on those who were suffering. And in my own life experience, when someone very close to me was struggling, I knew that he was the first person that I would reach out to for advice and assistance,” Pollack says in the docuseries. “[It was] almost like him finding clarity allowed him to be a superhero in that fight for others. But he couldn’t fight as well for himself.”
Perry felt enormous pressure about returning for the Friends reunion
In 2021, Perry agreed to participate in a reunion celebrating the 25th anniversary of Friends. But most people didn’t know that he was still recovering from a near-fatal colon perforation. In 2018, Perry’s colon burst — complications from his years of opioid addiction. The actor spent over two weeks in a coma. It took months for him to be released from the hospital and he had rarely been seen in public following the complication.
“I think he was very nervous about coming back out. I think he wanted to be like, ‘I’m here. I’m good. Everything’s fine,’” Perry Bowick says in the docuseries. “Which was only sort of half true at that point. He was still very much on the mend.”
The production took the old Friends sets out of storage and filmed the cast interacting on the sound stage, discussing their favorite moments and experiences filming. But Perry looked ill — which became one of the most discussed moments of the entire reunion.
“I do remember at the time of the Friends reunion, Matthew focused on being sober, struggling with sobriety, knowing the import of this,” Pollack adds. “Long awaited. Lots of pressure. He hadn’t been on camera in a while. And you could see him struggling. It’s tough to watch because he’s just not himself.”
Perry’s family and friends are still trying to make sense of the actor’s death and Perry’s legacy
Perry started going to a ketamine clinic in an attempt to curb the instincts to use drugs and alcohol. The drug gave him “freedom and energy,” according to his friends. It helped him get in the headspace to write his 2022 memoir, which included a press tour where he spoke openly about his experiences at the height of his addiction.
“It felt like he was trying as hard as he could to be as authentic as possible with this giant spotlight on him,” Perry Bowick says.
Perry died on Oct. 28, 2023. But while his friends and family were still trying to gather the facts, TMZ had already reported how he died.
“It was shocking how it happened, but there was a really big part of me that had been prepping for this for a while,” Perry’s friend Pressman says. “I was not entirely surprised at all.”
Perry’s family had a private, open-casket funeral for the actor. According to Perry Bowick, the Friends cast members walked into the funeral together. After hugging the family, the group held hands and walked together to Perry’s casket.
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Each of Perry’s close friends say they’ve had different ways to grieve the late actor and process his death. But Perry’s sister says she finds it easiest to think about Perry’s story in relation to his favorite song — “The Rainbow Connection,” which she describes as playful, sweet and melancholic all at the same time.
“How does Matthew’s story end? I still find a lot of solace in the fact that he was happy,” she says. “He said he was happy. He felt at peace.”