Could the new Netflix documentary about Matthew Perry be any more heartbreaking?
The three-episode doc, “The One About Matthew Perry,” covers the “Friends” star’s life, career, addiction struggles and untimely death.
After rising to fame in the iconic role of Chandler Bing on “Friends,” which aired for 10 seasons between 1994 to 2004 and has maintained a tight grip on the cultural zeitgeist over the years by continuing to find new audiences on streaming, Perry died at 54 on Oct. 28, 2023.
The actor’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, speaks out onscreen for the first time in the doc, along with several of his lifelong friends.
However, none of his “Friends” co-stars — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer — opted to participate in the project.
Here are all the revelations from “The One About Matthew Perry.”
Perry felt ‘very similar’ to Chandler
When Perry auditioned for “Friends,” he said he thought Chandler was “very similar to [him],” describing him in archival footage played in the doc as “a guy who was sort of trying to distract everybody from how miserable he was all the time by being funny.”
“I do remember that [Perry] said, ‘Somebody has written a script – this is me,'” his longtime pal, David Pressman, said. “Chandler is definitely him.”
Former NBC executive Warren Littlefield recalled that there was “anxiety” among the “Friends” producers, because the casting was easy, except for Chandler. “And then, Matthew Perry came into the room,” he said.
It took “less than 30 seconds” of Perry’s audition for everyone in the room to feel, “‘Oh yeah, this is it. This is Chandler. He just nailed it,'” Littlefield said.
Perry had two families, which made him feel like he was ‘too needy’
“The beliefs that I had were: I was too needy, I wasn’t enough, and I didn’t matter…my whole life was about trying to have those three things not be true,” Perry said in archival footage.
His father, John Bennett Perry, 85, is also an actor. After his parents split when he was a baby, Perry noted, “The only way I’d get to see my father on a regular basis was on television.”
When Perry was just 5, he flown alone from his mother’s house in Montreal to his father in Los Angeles. “They put a thing on my head that said ‘unescorted minor’ and I was incredibly scared,” he recalled.
Both of Perry’s parents went on to have other families: his mother Suzanne married “Dateline” anchor Keith Morrison, and the couple had four children, while Perry’s father married Debbie Boyle, and the couple welcomed Bowick.
Perry was allegedly unsurprised to become famous
As “Friends” swiftly became a phenomenon, Littlefield recalled, “The cast had this feeling of like, ‘Us? This is happening to us?’ and Matthew was like, ‘Of course this is happening!’”
Bowick noted that her brother’s fame was a “massive life shift” moment for their entire family.
“Any time I was with him, we’d be followed by paparazzi and get our picture taken, too,” she recalled. “All of a sudden, this is our new reality.”
Perry was ‘generous’ with his money
Bowick noted that her older brother was “always incredibly generous with his money.”
For Christmas when she was 15, she recalled that they were leaving a restaurant when the valet drove up in a red Ford Mustang convertible and asked, “Is Mia Perry here?”
When Bowick replied with confusion, she recalled that Perry told her, “Yeah, that is your car – Merry Christmas!”
Perry ‘did well with girls’
Pressman said that Perry “did well with girls” because “he knew how to charm them,” adding that the duo visited the Playboy Mansion together “a lot.”
Perry’s friend Marjorie Harris Newman, noted that Perry “had this sort of persona” that he “never” got the girl and would say, “But when I’m famous, I’ll get all the girls.”
Former “Friends” writer Jeff Strauss said that Perry went from being someone who was awkward with women in similar ways to Chandler to becoming “a guy who was fighting women off” when he found fame.
Perry’s experience of fame ‘started to shift’
Bowick noted that in the beginning it appeared Perry “liked the fame but, at some point, it did start to shift.”
In archival footage, Perry admitted, “I was extremely happy when I got famous. Then, after like six months, I was like, ‘Uh oh.'”
“This didn’t fix what’s inside of me,” he said. “This didn’t do what I thought it was gonna do.”
The actor had a “sense of emptiness or loneliness” dating back to his childhood that he “couldn’t quite fill,” Bowick explained, noting that it was it was “hard for him to find a space he felt really secure in” as he got shuffled between his two families.
Perry started drinking when he was 14
When Perry was 14, he got intoxicated for the first time “and was in heaven.”
“I thought, ‘This must be the way that normal people feel all the time,’” he said in archival footage.
Because he was “secretive” and “would drink alone,” Perry’s friends didn’t know about it right away, Newman said.
She speculated that alcohol reached “that very deep part of himself that always thought he was not enough,” adding that she thinks “he felt that becoming famous would fill that hole.”
Perry started abusing painkillers because of a jet ski accident
Doug Draizin, the producer of Perry’s 1997 rom-com “Fools Rush in” recalled that the shoot was going well until the actor “got permission to get on a jet ski” on Lake Mead during lunch break.
“He flung himself in the air, and he hurt himself,” Draizin said.
In archival footage, Perry explained that doctors gave him a painkillers at the time, from which he “felt this incredible euphoria.”
“So why wouldn’t I take more?” he reasoned. “And I started to feel sick when I wasn’t taking them.”
Draizin said of seeing Perry again four or five months later, “I was like, ‘This guy’s very sick.’ I thought it could have been cancer, it could have been immune something.”
At the time, Draizin noted, Perry chalked up his appearance to a lack of sleep.
His sister found out about his addiction through tabloids
In 1997, when Bowick said she was at the grocery store as a teenager, she saw tabloids with headlines about her brother’s addiction scandal.
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s obviously not true. I would know if something was going on. I’m his sister. We’re close,'” she recalled.
However, when she asked her parents about it, they admitted that Perry was in rehab.
Littlefield reflected on producers telling saying “Matthew has a problem” shortly before “Friends” started filming Season 4.
He agreed to do a rehab program, and their belief at the time “was that Matthew was wounded, and he would heal,” said Littlefield.
Perry had a ‘hard time managing his substance use’ while filming ‘Friends’
“Around Season 5, 6 and 7, we were starting to hear that he was having a very hard time managing his substance use while also filming ‘Friends,’” said Bowick.
She noted that her brother tried to hide it “so he would take just enough to make him feel OK but not enough to appear high — which was tricky.”
“He’d need to manage his withdrawal symptoms, tremors and stuff,” she added.
Strauss said he started hearing “rumors” that Perry had become “challenging and problematic.”
When they shut down production on Perry’s 2002 rom-com “Serving Sara” so that he could attend another rehab program, Bowick recalled that he felt “shame and guilt” because he knew that people’s livelihoods “depended on” the production.
“He hated that he had to do that to people, but he also knew that he needed to get well,” she said.
His father always helped him
Bowick said that it was the “norm” for their father to go see Perry if he was “struggling.”
“It didn’t matter what was happening in [our father’s] life,” she noted. “He would drop it in a second, and show up.”
Bowick speculated that their father “felt like he really owed a lot to Matthew for not getting to be there when he was younger.”
The ‘unspoken truth’ around Chandler and Monica’s wedding
Chandler tied the knot with Monica (Cox) in the two-part “Friends” Season 7 finale, “The One With Monica and Chandler’s Wedding,” which aired in May 2001.
“The unspoken truth we were all sitting with in one way or another was, is this his wedding?” Bowick said.
At the time, Bowick recalled that Perry “was going back and forth from rehab” to the set of “Friends,” and “both sides of the family” were present to watch the episode taping.
“It was a really big deal, because we’re all worried about him. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future,” she said, noting that it was “impossible” to “navigate relationships while also battling this crippling addiction.”
When Chandler said his vows to Monica, the “emotion” in Perry’s eyes “was so real,” his sister recalled.
Perry and Cox “had such a lovely relationship, and years of working through this thing,” she noted.
“There was so clearly actual love there,” she added. “Platonic love, but love. It’s a happy memory, mixed with some sadness.”
Perry’s lifelong friend Roger Castillo recalled an incident when he was complaining about his kids and the actor allegedly replied, “Roger, I would give everything I have to have what you have.”
Perry had ‘regret’ from moving on ‘quickly’ from girlfriends
Perry ultimately never married, or had kids. His dating history included Julia Roberts and “Mean Girls” star Lizzy Caplan.
His 2020 engagement to literary manager Molly Hurwitz was called off the following year.
Castillo noted that he would consider “several” of Perry’s relationships to be “serious.”
“But he would move on quickly, and then regret moving on,” he explained.
Castillo alleged that Perry used to habitually say after breakups, “I loved her so much. Why did I do that? I made a terrible mistake. Don’t mention her name!”
Rome Shadanloo, who dated Perry in 2011, said in the doc that “intimacy was [Perry’s] greatest wish, and biggest fear.”
Perry allegedly went to AA meetings three times a day
Perry’s pal Tim Harrington had his own addiction issues, and moved in with the actor in 2001. During their time as roommates, the duo “went to meetings three times a day,” Harrington claimed.
He recalled playing the song “Drops of Jupiter” by Train “a hundred times” on the way to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the historic West Hollywood Log Cabin.
After their morning meeting, they had breakfast, attended a second meeting at noon and then discussed “what [their] next meeting would be,” he said.
Attending all the meetings was about “putting out of our minds the pain and discomfort and struggle,” Harrington explained. “When it got quiet, that stuff would rise to the top.”
Perry spent staggering amount trying to get sober
“He spent $7 million trying to get sober — that’s how seriously he took his disease,” said Bowick.
Pressman said Perry’s friends “had an inking when he was using” because he wouldn’t reply to their calls and text messages.
“There was a point there where I was like, ‘Let’s tie him up.’ I was desperate for an answer,” said Castillo. “It’s very hard to support somebody when they’re not calling you back or they’re avoiding you. I did wonder what else I could do.”
Perry’s anniversary for getting sober was near Bowick’s birthday, with his sister noting that “he never quite could make it for a year.”
His post- ‘Friends’ disappointments were ‘tangled up’ in his health
When “Friends” ended in 2004, there was a “vast expanse of space, all of a sudden — and not necessarily knowing what’s gonna fill in that space,” Bowick said.
“The disappointment of these shows not working after ‘Friends’ is also very tangled up in his health,” she noted, adding that there was an “assumption” her brother may have harbored deep down that some of the projects “would have gone differently” if he’d been able to remain well.
Perry’s next big role was Aaron Sorkin’s NBC show “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which was cancelled after just one season in 2007.
Nate Torrance, one of Perry’s “Studio 60” co-stars, said the actor was “feeling the pressure” as the show floundered.
In 2011, Perry co-created and starred in his ABC sitcom “Mr. Sunshine,” which was also canceled after just one season amid low ratings.
Torrance, who was also in that show, recalled, “When he called to let us know the show was cancelled, he was so apologetic to me. And he said, ‘I’m just so sorry. I’m so sorry, man. I couldn’t get you there.’”
Torrance said he had “nothing but thankfulness” and didn’t think it was Perry’s “job” to make his career take off, saying, “Whatever [Perry] wanted this show to do for me … he needed that maybe more than I did.”
Perry found a purpose in ‘helping people’
Following those career failures, around 2013 Perry started realizing “how much he wanted to be helping people,” said Bowick.
“It started in AA, when he got to sponsor people,” she said. “As time went on, he got more and more interested in things like drug court, or opening his own sober living, and really trying to do as much as he can with the platform he had.”
West Huddleston, former CEO of All Rise — which advocates for alternatives to incarceration for people with substance abuse problems — noted that Perry “used his celebrity, his brilliance, his charm, to get him to pay attention to this.”
When Huddleston and Perry appeared on BBC Newsnight in December of 2013, the “Friends” star got into a heated argument with fellow panelist Peter Hitchens, who dismissed the idea that addiction was a disease.
“I’ve never seen him angry,” Huddleston recalled. “It was almost as if Matthew was saying, ‘You’re not gonna talk about my people like that.”
Perry’s ‘masterpiece’ was a 2016 play, but he was ‘annihilated’ after
In 2016, Perry wrote and starred in the play “The End of Longing,” which showed in London’s West End.
Bowick called it his “masterpiece,” but noted that it “took a lot out of him” and left him feeling “pretty annihilated.”
Jonathan Lynn, who directed Perry in 2000’s “The Whole Nine Yards” went to see the play and praised it as “brave, honest and well constructed.”
But when he visited Perry backstage after the show, he recalled, “He didn’t seem to be the man I used to know. He was subdued, and not very communicative.”
Lynn felt like he was looking at “the wreckage of what could have been an extraordinarily successful career, and a very happy man,” saying he felt that Perry “was a prisoner of his addiction.”
His 2018 near-death experience made his sister think ‘he’s not waking up’
Bowick recalled getting called to the hospital in 2018 because of Perry was having a “serious medical emergency” and was in a coma, saying, “It was the first time I’ve seen him and I was like, ‘This is it, he’s not waking up.’”
She added that he had “a lot of near misses” in his life.
“Theres been overdoses, there’s been car accidents, there’s been all sorts of stuff,” Bowick explained. “But this was the only time that there were a lot of people going, ‘We have no idea if he’s coming out of this thing.’”
The doctors told her that Perry’s colon had ruptured in “several places, causing intense sepsis throughout his entire body,” she said.
Perry spoke about his near-death experience in October of 2022, telling People, “The doctors told my family that I had a 2% chance to live.” He also detailed it in his memoir.
Bowick explained that Perry had “multiple surgeries” to repair his colon, and that “at one point the decision was made to put him on an ECMO machine, which is basically like an iron lung.”
“His fingertips were turning black,” she recalled. “There was a possibility that he would lose his fingers.”
Perry was in the hospital for three months and was “legitimately scared”
Bowick, who said she became a therapist partly because of her brother, recalled how they were told Perry’s colon ruptured due to opioid use, calling it a “slap in the face” to learn.
“There’s so much grief family members and friends have to sit with when their loved ones are struggling with substance abuse,” she said, noting that she felt “angry at him” at the time.
After Perry woke up from his coma, Bowick said “he just kind of quietly closed his eyes, and just started crying” when they told him what happened.
“He was legitimately scared, when he found out that he was in a coma,” she noted, saying she felt “cautiously optimistic” that the incident could be his “rock bottom” and could be his “wake-up call.”
“Even when he went home, he was still in really really bad shape,” Bowick recalled. “He had a completely open wound in his gut that wasn’t fully and completely healed. He had a colostomy bag. He aged 20 years in three months.”
At the time, she said “he could barely walk” and had nurses and sober companions around the clock.
He was ‘struggling’ for the 2021 ‘Friends’ reunion
For the 2021 “Friends” reunion that aired on HBO Max, Perry’s friend Kevin Pollak, said “he hadn’t been on camera in a while, and you could see him struggling in it.”
“It’s tough to watch, because he’s just not himself,” he added.
Bowick said Perry was “very nervous about coming back out” as the reunion was his first big return to the spotlight following his 2018 near-death experience.
“I think he wanted to be like, ‘I’m here. I’m good. Everything’s fine.’ Which was only sort of half true, at that point,” she added, noting that “the energy and life force in him was really diminished.”
Perry was ‘fighting for his life’ around 2021
Perry felt “relieved” and “tired” after filming the “Friends” reunion, Bowick noted. However, his sister said he was also wondering how to keep going.
“I know he was really scared, I know he was really fighting for his life,” she added.
Part of him “did not think it was possible to live a sober life,” she explained.
While she refused to give up “hope” in her brother, Bowick said she started thinking of his addiction “as a terminal illness.”
Perry was forced back on opioids because his teeth were falling out
Huddleston recalled an incident when Perry called him on FaceTime and was “missing some teeth.”
In his book, Perry talked about getting dental surgeries after years of substance abuse had damaged his teeth.
“He knew that was going to put him back on opiates for pain. He was deathly afraid of that spiral again,” Huddleston said.
An unspecified amount of time later, Huddleston recalled seeing Perry “going to a ketamine clinic” as needed when he was getting his energy back after “he detoxed from the pain meds.”
Perry felt like he had a ‘spiritual experience’ with ketamine
“As a therapist, I was always skeptical about the idea of using a substance to treat a substance use disorder,” Bowick said.
But when she started hearing that Perry was getting ketamine injections in clinical settings, she said “he seemed the best he’s ever been.”
“He shared that he felt like he had spiritual experience in the ketamine, that he had seen that we have multiple lives, that he felt like he saw God in the ketamine,” said Bowick.
Huddleston noted that Perry felt like ketamine offered relief from “his darkness” at the time.
“I just heard a lot of hope in his voice,” he shared.
Perry’s memoir was ‘his life’s work‘
Perry got candid about his life and addiction struggles in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing.”
Bowick noted that she believes the book “was accomplishing his life’s work.”
“He had been trying to scale a mountain for his entire life … and he made it to the top of that mountain,” she said.
Of the book topping the bestseller lists, Pressman said, “He loved that the book was a huge success.”
Bowick noted that while Perry was promoting the book “he was the happiest we’d really ever seen him.”
How his sister found out he died
Bowick’s phone had been turned off all day on Oct. 28, 2023, as she was at a conference in Denver. She recalled her husband, David, coming in “kind of flying” to deliver the news of Perry’s death.
“He’s just staring at me with this look on his face, and I was like, ‘What? What? What?’” she said.
“It’s your brother. He’s gone,” he told her.
Bowick said she didn’t cry or “have a single reaction,” but replied, “No, he’s not.”
When she turned her phone on, the first call was from Robin Ruzan, Perry’s friend and the co-executor of his estate, who asked Bowick if it was true.
Bowick remembered, “And I go, ‘I don’t know. How do you know?’ And she goes, ‘TMZ already has it.’”
His cause of death was a ‘flood of confusion’ to his sister
Perry died in his hot tub at his California home and, per an autopsy report, his death was chalked up to “acute effects of ketamine” with the manner listed as an accidental drowning.
“We didn’t know anything about how Matthew had died. The story that most of us were thinking had happened was that he’d had a heart attack while sitting in his jacuzzi,” Bowick explained, noting that she felt a “flood of confusion” when the autopsy report came out.
“That was the first time that I’d found out that he was doing extra ketamine on the side,” she said, adding that she had “so many different conflicting feelings coming in.”
The ‘Friends’ cast held hands and cried around his casket at the funeral
Perry’s private funeral was “close friends and family only,” Bowick said, noting that Cox, Aniston, Kudrow, LeBlanc and Schwimmer all “walked in together.”
“All five of them walked up to the casket holding hands and stood around him, crying,” she recalled.
During the sad event on Nov. 3, 2023, Aniston was “the first one of them to come up to me and give me a huge hug, but they all did,” said Bowick.
At the time, Perry’s sister admitted she “hadn’t seen them in easily 20 years.”
His sister laughed at his funeral
At one point during the funeral, Perry’s sister said she “felt Matthew with me.”
“He showed up right behind my right shoulder and goes, ‘How f–ked up is this?” she remembered.
“And I started laughing so hard. I was like, ‘Oh my God, there he is! Making me laugh at the most horrible moment.”
His family felt ‘betrayed’ by his assistant
Perry’s longtime assistant Kenneth Iwamasa was among the five individuals arrested after the actor’s death in August 2024.
“The level of betrayal we all felt,” said Bowick, who recalled wishing “I hope it’s not Kenny” while on the phone with her mother prior to the identities of those being charged being revealed.
“He should have known better,” said Bowick. “He could have quit his job. He could have come and told one of the family members. He could have done a lot of different things. He could have made a lot of different choices.”
She added that she “felt really like I had been duped, deeply” because the family “all really liked him and really trusted him.”
In May 2026, Iwamasa was sentenced to three years and five months behind bars for helping to administer the fatal shots of ketamine to his boss. He’s currently serving his sentence.
Iwamasa addressed Perry’s family at his sentencing, telling them, “I’m so sorry to all of you. Matthew loved you.” He added he would take the mistake to his grave.
The four other people charged included doctor Salvador Plasencia, doctor Mark Chavez, drug trafficker Jasveen Sangha (aka the “Ketamine Queen”) and a “broker” named Erik Fleming.
Sangha received the harshest punishment, being sentenced to 15 years behind bars in early 2026.
“The One About Matthew Perry” is now streaming on Netflix.