‘An ironic, self-deprecating metrosexual’: how Matthew Perry captured the spirit of the age
‘Chandler Bing,” wrote Matthew Perry in his puckish, self-mocking memoir, “changed the way that America spoke”. The actor’s bold words were true – but only up to a point. Yes, there was a period in the late 1990s when people overemphasised the verb to comic effect: “Could that beany more annoying?” But that was really more of a verbal tic. The Matthew Perry/Chandler Bing paradox was that he demanded not to be taken seriously, and in doing so, became the ego ideal of generation X, which is a pretty serious job. So even though he had – no question – the best lines in Friends, he was never what he would have been in an earlier era: the sidekick.
So much of the plot structure rested on Chandler being the second string: the maladroit loser to Joey’s lothario, the joker skating beneath Ross’s romantic gravity. He was never intended as the leading man. He and Monica were never story-arced to get married. The One With Ross’s Wedding: Part 2 was meant to just be a one-night stand. Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman said years later: “We thought it was going to be funny, then we were going to get rid of it.” In the event, they actually had to stop taping because people in the delighted audience were screaming.
Of course Chandler was the romantic lead. His was the spirit of the age: self-deprecating, metrosexual, all ironic distance, no ambition. It had a gravitational pull. It’s the classic stuff of romance, the Emma plot: the guy who creeps up on you, because, duh, he’s everything. Except Chandler did that to his own creators. Incidentally, he’s a way better character before he gets together with Monica. And he’s a way better character when he hates his job. The unfolding of adulthood was like kicking two legs off a stool. Gen X is a shadow of itself when it grows up.
Perry always said how much like his character he was, to the extent that when he auditioned for the role, he went completely off script and just started delivering more material: he wrote 10 jokes for every episode, and reliably got two in. His particulars were telling: an only child whose parents divorced when he was one. His real-life dad was an alcoholic, later recovered, an actor, but small-time. His mother was press aide to Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister. Before Perry developed acting ambitions he was an obsessive tennis player, nationally ranked in Canada by the age of 14. He discovered drinking around the same time and was, he wrote, “a broken human being” by 15, when he moved to Hollywood.
The great mystery of Friends is why none of its players made much cinematic impact beyond its enormous influence – and this was truer of Perry than of anyone. He turned in completely fine performances in unremarkable films: Fools Rush In, Almost Heroes, The Ron Clark Story. He cocreated and co-wrote the TV series Mr Sunshine in the early 2010s, but it lasted only a year before low ratings killed it. It is possible that the residuals model sapped everyone’s ambition: Warner makes a billion dollars a year from syndication reruns, of which the cast get 2% each. That’s $20m (£16.5m) apiece.
More important but harder to quantify was the cultural effect of Friends: people really fell for those characters, hard. All six of the actors had the world at their feet, but nobody really wanted to see them step out of role – because it broke the spell. It is impossible to overstate how seriously we all took it, when Jennifer Aniston married Brad Pitt. It was as if Rachel herself had achieved the unthinkable, a Little Mermaid move where she crashed out of the ocean and brought the fairytale into real life.
Perry’s romantic history was, of course, chequered, which is to say, eventful, but nothing lasted. The details of his relationship with Julia Roberts are so 1990s, it is unreal: he wooed her by fax (yes, kids, this was a thing). And Perry dumped Roberts to avoid getting dumped himself, he said later, relaying deliciously: “I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.” It was a move that had all the logic of Chandler Bing himself.
Back then, we would have called Perry a commitment-phobe, but what he actually was was a drug addict. The story of his dependency is told through his changing appearance in the passing seasons of the show: “heavier” when he was drinking, thin when he was on drugs, thin with a goatee when he was on a lot of drugs. The rest of the cast protected him when he was too gone to deliver his lines, and tried to intervene many times, having guessed at only a tiny fraction of his substance abuse.
It is incredible, really, how long he survived, plausibly playing this character who may have started life so similarly to Perry himself, but diverged in one critical way: like all the Friends characters, his was almost impossibly clean-living. It never really made sense, all the high jinks they got up to, powered only by coffee. It was very much generation X, the US edition: such a show in the UK would have had at least one very heavy drinker, and Central Perk would have been a pub. Perry was its guilty secret, the One Who Wasn’t Really Very Like His Character at All Any More, and he was powerfully aware of that.
That 2022 memoir, called Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, concluded with a thankful utterance that was no less credible for being obligatory in a recovering addict: “At this point in my life,” he wrote, “the words of gratitude pour out of me because I should be dead, and yet somehow, I am not.”
Perry’s entire adult life was plagued by addiction. Telling his story in numbers, he estimated that he had been in twice-weekly therapy for 30 years, checked into rehab 15 times, and attended more than 6,000 AA meetings. He had numerous other health crises, including a perforated colon in 2019 that put him in a two-week coma. “So full of shit it nearly killed me,” he said of the event.
But in a pre-opioid world, he would have just got clean, eventually. Maybe he wouldn’t have made old bones, but he wouldn’t have died this young, not at 54. He should have had a longer sunset. His death feels tragically discordant – an unjust end to a life lived in the service of the punchline.
He’s a way better character before he gets together with Monica. And he’s a way better character when he hates his job