Obituaries: Matthew Perry, ​comedy actor who found fame as Chandler in Friends

​Matthew Perry, actor. Born: 19 August, 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Died: 28 October, 2023 in Los Angeles, aged 54.

Matthew Perry spent hours recording and rerecording his dialogue and jokes – not for the show Friends, but for the message on his phone, determined to get it right and make the desired impression on callers.

As with so many great comedy actors, the smile, the comedy, the laughs masked anxiety, self-doubt and unhappiness. And yet perhaps his comedy originated in the anxiety and self-doubt.

There was a part of Chandler Bing, Matthew Perry’s character on the sitcom Friends, that a lot of us could readily identify with – that mix of confidence and insecurity. He could be witty, but he could also be a bit dopey. The smile seemed a little uncertain at times. Perry certainly identified with Chandler. “It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler,” he said. “I was Chandler.”

‘It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler,' Matthew Perry once said. 'I was Chandler.’ (Picture: Rich Fury/Invision/AP, File)

Perry was not just anxious. His struggles went deeper. He talked openly about addiction and depression and wrote about them in a memoir entitled Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.

His perfectionism and frustrations bordered on obsessive compulsive disorder, maybe broke through the border. He worried about big things and little things, like the message on his phone.

Towards the end of Friends’s decade-long run from 1994 to 2004, the six principals were getting paid $1 million an episode – and there were 236 episodes in total. Perry lived a life of luxury, but he was terrified of the laughs drying up and filmed several series of the show in a haze of drink and drugs. He could remember recording the message on his phone, but could not remember recording many episodes of the show.

He dated famous and beautiful women, including Julia Roberts, and he was briefly engaged a few years ago to a literary manager more than 20 years younger than him. He dreamed of marrying, settling down and starting a family. But a lasting relationship and lasting happiness eluded him. He died alone in his hot tub overlooking Pacific Palisades.

It is perhaps telling that in one interview when he was asked specifically if he was lonely, he replied that he had two assistants. He mentioned assistants rather than friends, a term one would have thought would come very readily to his lips. But no.

There is a scene in one of the early episodes of Friends where Phoebe’s short-lived psychologist boyfriend Roger responds to a Chandler quip by suggesting that he has intimacy issues and uses humour to keep people at a distance. “Only child, right? Parents divorced before you hit puberty?”

And so it was with Perry. He was born Matthew Langford Perry in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His father was an actor, who became the face of Old Spice aftershave. His mother was Canadian, a journalist, who later became press secretary for the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Perry’s parents split up when he was a baby. He grew up in Ottawa and went to school with Trudeau’s son Justin, the current Canadian Prime Minister. Perry was jealous of Justin’s sporting prowess and he and another boy beat him up one day.

Perry tweeted about it one day and Trudeau responded: “I’ve been giving it some thought, and you know what, who hasn’t wanted to punch Chandler? How about a rematch @MatthewPerry?”

Perry was actually an extremely good tennis player, practising for hours and hours each day. He was also funny, attracting the girls with his good looks and self-deprecating humour, and he showed promise as an actor at school. After a visit to his father in Los Angeles, he decided that what he really wanted to do was to be an actor, or rather specifically a film star, with all the money and adulation that promised.

By the early 1990s he was getting work in television and movies, but it was Friends that made him a star, albeit on the small screen. The role of Chandler seemed to have been written for him. It was not just Perry who thought that. Actor friends thought the character so like Perry that they came to him for advice. And when Perry himself auditioned he ad-libbed with his own jokes and his own, offbeat delivery and rhythm that became so much a part of Chandler on screen.

For a while Friends was the most popular show on American television. It made stars of Perry, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow, Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston. They all went on to movies, with varying degrees of success.

Perry’s big-screen credits include Fools Rush In, Three to Tango, The Whole Nine Yards and 17 Again, but none of them are exactly classics. On TV he had recurring roles in The West Wing and The Good Wife. He also produced a revamp of The Odd Couple, with himself as Oscar Madison, the role played in the original film by Walter Matthau.

He was drinking heavily in his mid-teens, but managed to hide it at work for a long time. His addiction problems worsened when he became hooked on painkillers after a jetski accident. His weight yo-yoed and he became a regular in rehab.

In 2018 he had pneumonia and a burst colon caused by opioids and he spent two weeks in a coma. At that point, at the age of 49, he reckoned he had spent more than half his life in treatment centres.

He struggled with various neuroses and yet somehow he managed to mine them to make the world laugh. “I’m not so good with the advice – can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” Chandler says. On another occasion Joey finds it difficult to believe that Chandler did not cry when Bambi died. “Yes,” Chandler replies, “it was so sad when the guy stopped drawing the deer.”

Phoebe’s boyfriend Roger did not last long, but he made his mark. “You’re so funny,” he tells Chandler. And then he adds: “I wouldn’t want to be there when the laughter stops.”

In the days before his death Perry the laughter had seemingly stopped. He posted a video on social media of the Moon and the words “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? and a photo of himself in the hot tub and the caption “Oh, so warm water swirling around makes you feel good?”

He did not have children. He is survived by his parents.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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