Troubled Friends star Perry: I dumped Julia Roberts because I was scared she’d leave me...
FRIENDS star Matthew Perry has told how he wooed Julia Roberts with hundreds of fax messages – before ditching her because he feared she would leave him.
Perry, 53, revealed their romance began after the Pretty Woman star was approached to be in the sitcom in 1995.
Producers urged him to contact Ms Roberts after she stipulated she would only take a guest role if she could be in a storyline with his character, Chandler Bing.
Perry said: ‘I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read, “The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers.”
‘Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift – bagels, lots and lots of bagels.’
Her agreement to star in a special episode of the second series of Friends
‘I couldn’t be enough for her, I was broken, bent, unlovable’
prompted what Perry now describes as a ‘three-month courtship’ through daily faxes while she was working on a film in France. By the time shooting for the episode started, they were a couple.
Writing in his forthcoming autobiography, Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing, Perry reveals that they exchanged hundreds of messages in the days before email was commonplace.
He writes: ‘Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive. I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of 10, one had.’
He and Ms Roberts, who turns 55 this week, eventually embarked on a relationship, but Perry dumped her two months after she appeared on the show.
He admits: ‘Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me.
Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable.
‘So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.
‘She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.’
In the book, published on November 1, Perry also reveals his neardeath ordeal with opioids. And he confesses that five years later, he watched her lift an Oscar for her Erin Brockovich as he was ‘sweating and twitching’ in rehab. Perry writes: ‘As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry,
pleading, filled with longing and tears. I made a joke. “I’ll take you back,” I said. “I’ll take you back.”
‘The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now.’