Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

by Matthew Perry

in fact, in drinking I got a 4.0 GPA

“Drinkers think they are trying to escape, but really they are trying to overcome a mental disorder they didn’t know they had.” Eureka!—someone understands me. But reading that was both wonderful and horrible. It meant I wasn’t alone—there were others who thought like me—but it also meant I was an alcoholic and would have to quit drinking one day at a time, for the rest of my life.

I can’t decide if I actually like people or not.

Alcohol was my best friend because it never wanted to talk about itself. It was just always there, the mute dog at my heel, gazing up at me, always ready to go on a walk. It took away so much of the pain, including the fact that when I was alone, I was lonely, and that when I was with people, I was lonely, too.

It allowed me to control my feelings and, in doing so, control my world. Like a friend, it was there for me. And I was fairly certain I would go crazy without it. And I’m right about that,

Learning to move forward in life without it was tantamount to asking someone to go about his or her day without breathing. For that, I will always be grateful to alcohol. It finally beat me into a state of reasonableness.

Valerie Bertinelli—those seven syllables once stirred every part of my soul and other parts.

I have spent my life being attracted to unavailable women. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to figure out that this had something to do with my relationship with my mother.

That’s why I slept with so many women. I was trying to re-create my childhood and win.

I held firm in my belief that fame would fill that unaccompanied hole in me, the one that Valerie refused to fill. But now it was just me and vodka attempting and failing this seemingly impossible task. When fame finally happened, well … we’re coming to that.

One character in particular stood out to me: it wasn’t that I thought I could play “Chandler,” I was Chandler.

But the final role available during the entire pilot season of 1994, Chandler in Friends Like Us, was still not cast.

You know how sometimes the universe has plans for you that are hard to believe, how the world wants something for you even though you’ve done your best to close off that avenue?

I was back in Ottawa with the Murrays; I got laughs where no one else had. I was cheering up my mother. And Chandler was born. This was my part now and there was no stopping it. The pilot season of 1994 had cast its final actor: Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing.

Now, all these years later, I’m certain that I got famous so I would not waste my entire life trying to get famous. You have to get famous to know that it’s not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.

Ketamine was a very popular street drug in the 1980s. There is a synthetic form of it now, and it’s used for two reasons: to ease pain and help with depression. Has my name written all over it—they might as well have called it “Matty.”

In the operating room they gave me propofol, you know, the drug that killed Michael Jackson. I learned then and there that Michael Jackson didn’t want to be high, he wanted to be out. Zero consciousness. And yet another masterful talent taken from us by this terrible disease.

Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes. It wasn’t a heart attack—I didn’t flatline—but nothing had been beating.

really didn’t want the guy from Friends dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest. If I hadn’t been on Friends, would he have stopped at three minutes? Did Friends save my life again?

“Oh, they’ll consult,” she said, “but I’m in charge now. Here’s thirty milligrams.” This would not do. I would get incredibly sick. There was only one thing for it: that very same night, I booked another $175,000 private jet and flew right back to Switzerland.

Actually, I can think of a cure, it’s called, “being somebody else.”

I had asked her parents, begged for her hand while high, and put up with the dogs. That’s how scared I was of being abandoned.

But in recent years, I’ve come to understand just what Friends means to people. And we knew from the very start that it was something very, very special.

The following Monday after the Friday I was hired was day one of my new life—this was big, and I guess we all felt that way, because we all showed up dead on time. Well, Matt LeBlanc was first, every single day; Aniston last, every single day. The cars got nicer, but the order stayed the same.

Courteney Cox was wearing a yellow dress and was cripplingly beautiful. I had heard about Lisa Kudrow from a mutual friend, and she was just as gorgeous and hilarious and incredibly smart as my friend had said. Mattie LeBlanc was nice and a cool customer, and David Schwimmer had had his hair cut really short (he had been playing Pontius Pilate for his theater troupe in Chicago) over his hangdog face and was incredibly funny right away; warm and smart and creative.

I’d always wanted to be the only funny one. But now, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, I quickly realized that it’s better if everyone is funny.

Because, why else would anybody like me? It would take fifteen years for me to learn that I didn’t need to be a joke machine.

We were always together. As we all walked to our cars and said goodbye that first evening, I remember thinking, I’m happy. This was not an emotion I was altogether used to.

I realized that I was leaning toward the windshield as I drove. I wanted to be there. That would be true for the next decade.

But I knew Chandler. I could shake hands with Chandler. I was him.

This show was going to work, and it was going to change everyone’s lives forever.

I was going to be so famous that all the pain I carried with me would melt like frost in sunlight; and any new threats would bounce off me as though this show was a force field I could cloak myself in.

At my lunch I said two things: one, that even though I considered myself not unattractive, I had terrible luck with women and that my relationships tended toward the disastrous; and two, that I was not comfortable in any silence at all—I have to break any such moment with a joke. And this became a built-in excuse for Chandler Bing to be funny—

early in the making of Friends I realized that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston.

So many shows have blooper reels, but there are only a few for Friends. From the pilot on … in fact, that pilot was error-free. We were the New York Yankees: slick, professional, top of our game from the very start. We were ready.

Occasionally Matt would come into my dressing room, mostly during season one, and ask me how to say his lines. And I would tell him, and he would go downstairs, and he would nail it … but he gets Most Improved Player because by season ten, I was going into his room and asking him how he would say certain of my lines.

“Your lives are going to utterly change,” Jimmy said, “so do some things in public now because once you’re as famous as you’re about to be, you’ll never be able to do them again.”

I still wanted fame, but already I could taste a wild and weird flavor in the air—would fame, that elusive lover, really fill all the holes I carried around with me?

Would giving up a “normal” life be worth the price paid, of people digging through my trash, clicking pictures through telephoto lenses of me at my worst, or best, or everything in between?

loved my co-actors, I loved the scripts, I loved everything about the show … but I was also struggling with my addictions, which only added to my sense of shame. I had a secret, and no one could know. And even making the shows could be painful. As I admitted at the reunion in 2020, “I felt like I was gonna die if [the live audience] didn’t laugh. And it’s not healthy for sure. But I would sometimes say a line, and they wouldn’t laugh, and I would sweat and—and just, like, go into convulsions. If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out. I felt like that every single night.”

This was fame. And just beyond the glare of the city, beyond the skyscrapers and the faint stars twinkling beyond the midtown skies, God looked down on me, just waiting it out. He’s got all the time in the world. Fuck, he invented time. He wouldn’t forget. Something was looming. I had an idea what it was, but I did not know for sure. Something to do with drinking every night … but just how bad was it going to be?

The illness was deepening, but I couldn’t see it, not then. And if anyone saw how much I was drinking, they might be alarmed and ask me to stop. And stopping was, of course, impossible.

I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realize they are the wrong dreams.

Given everything, there is no way I wouldn’t change places with Craig, and David Pressman, and the guy in the gas station down the block—I’d change places with all of them in a minute, and forever, if only I could not be who I am, the way I am, bound on this wheel of fire. They don’t have a brain that wants them dead. They slept fine at night. I don’t expect that would make them feel any better about the choices they made, the way their lives went. I would give it all up not to feel this way. I think about it all the time; it’s no idle thought—it’s a coldhearted fact.

I did let her in, both figuratively and literally, and a relationship began. We would already be a couple by the time we started filming the Friends Super Bowl episode.

I have been nominated for four Emmys in my life so far. One in comedy, and three in drama.)

But everything in my life was perfect. I had the most beautiful, famous woman in the world as my girlfriend; I was on the number one TV show in America; I was making a lot of money shooting a movie that could only be a number one box-office smash.

I stashed that pill in my pocket, and I swear to God I think if I’d never taken it, none of the next three decades would have gone the way they did. Who knows? I just know it was really bad.

I thought about my childhood, but it didn’t hurt, not then. As the pill kicked in, something clicked in me. And it’s been that click I’ve been chasing the rest of my life.

I felt so good that if a locomotive hit me, I would simply turn to the engineer and say, “It happens, brother.” I was lying in the grass in Canada in my backyard, surrounded once again with Murray puke. I couldn’t believe how good I felt; I was in complete and pure euphoria. The pill had replaced the blood in my body with warm honey. I was on top of the world. It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had. Nothing could ever go wrong.