Friends ace had tennis aims before netting gig
After 10 seasons and 236 episodes, Matthew Perry was given the iconic final line which brought one of television’s most popular series to an end.
And as fans around the world gear up for next month’s 25th anniversary of the first episode of Friends, the actor who played unlucky-in-love Chandler Bing will celebrate another milestone moment – his 50th birthday.
On Tuesday, August 19, 1969, Matthew Langford Perry was born in the small border town of Williamstown, Massachusetts – the only child of journalist Suzanne Marie Langford and actor John Bennett Perry.
When his parents divorced, Matthew moved to Canada with his mother, where he soon developed a natural talent for tennis.
His ability on the court was so impressive, he was a nationally-ranked junior player by the time he was 13, and looked set to spend his career serving aces.
But a move to be closer to his father quickly set Perry on a very different path, and he was soon taking his first steps into the Hollywood limelight.
“I was a very good tennis player in Canada then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 15, and everyone in LA just killed me,” he explained years later in an interview with Men’s Health magazine.
“I was pretty great in Canada. Not so much in LA.
“It was insane. I realised I wouldn’t be playing tennis for a living, so I went for acting.”
After following in his father’s footsteps, Perry was cast in a variety of leading television roles, but it wasn’t until being cast in a little-known project called Insomnia Cafe, later Six Of One and then Friends, that he finally got his big break.
Reportedly winning the role ahead of Jon Favreau, for the next 10 years Perry played sarcastic funnyman Chandler Bing, and became one of the most recognisable faces on television.
As the popularity of Friends grew – eventually earning each of the cast members a record-breaking $1 million per episode – so did Perry’s CV, with a string of movies and TV shows throughout the ’90s and 2000s.
However, the media scrutiny that came with such huge critical success proved overwhelming for Perry, and over the years he was treated for addiction to painkillers, drugs and alcohol, resulting in multiple stays in rehab.
Perry himself has admitted he didn’t consider the impact of fame on his life.
“I was a guy who wanted to become famous,” he said to the New York Times in 2002.
“There was steam coming out of my ears, I wanted to be famous so badly.
“You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant.
“I didn’t think what the repercussions would be.”