Matthew Perry was a tremendous performer. So why wasn’t he a movie star?
Dr Doug Ross from TV’s ER made it in the movies. Wisecracking, balding private detective David Addison from TV’s Moonlighting made it in the movies. West Philadelphia-born-and-raised-kid Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of BelAir made it in the movies.
So why not Chandler Bing? Why couldn’t Matthew Perry, that brilliant performer whose glorious TV character became everyone’s ideal friend and the very dating-app epitome of GSOH, have joined George Clooney, Bruce Willis and Will Smith in the cinema? Or as a shrewd, smart writer, could Perry have followed Richie Cunningham from TV’s Happy Days – director Ron Howard – for a career behind the camera?
Well, actually he could and did. Perry made plenty of interesting indie movies, did accomplished work on TV dramas by Aaron Sorkin and wrote a successful stage play for London’s West End and Broadway. But replicating his colossal TV success and legendary small-screen status in the cinema – cashing in that career capital and reinvesting it in Hollywood – didn’t happen.
Perhaps if he could have made a complete recovery from his addiction issues, or if these issues in an alternative universe had never existed. Yet that speculation is meaningless: his issues were arguably part of his personality ecosystem. Certainly, those troubles would have made insuring
Perry for any big studio project very difficult: his post-Friends movie career was more about finding scripts he liked, getting attached to them and enabling the producers to get independent funding on the basis of his involvement. But even that thought doesn’t entirely hold water. Robert Downey Jr, whose drug history is legendary, wound up becoming a huge superhero name in the corporate studio world.
So yes. With a bit more luck, Perry could have had Jesse Eisenberg’s career, playing Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Luthor, writing witty stories for the New Yorker and McSweeney’s.
It has something to do with the addictive nature of TV fame, the dopamine rush of international small-screen brand identity, combined with the security of a regular big-paying gig in your 20s delivering the kind of money undreamt of by all but the biggest Hollywood A-listers. And Perry came of age at a time when television itself was assuming a new prestige and there wasn’t the same need to prove yourself outside. Certainly no one now would dream of patronising TV or Perry’s achievement on it.
All of the Friends cast were superb at delivering gags, playing physical comedy and getting studio audience laughs (as opposed to the echoing silence of a film studio, where an actor might in his or her eyeline glimpse the director’s thoughtfully unsmiling face reflected in the light of the video playback).
Monica, Joey, Ross, Rachel and Phoebe had faces, voices and personalities which popped deliciously on screen. And Chandler Bing even more so, because he was the one who was supposed to be funny, supposed to be making the others laugh as well as us at home – and Perry, who contributed script material to the show himself, was ultra-aware of his own supercharged comic success in the continuing TV role.
Movies are different. When Steven Spielberg first saw the young George Clooney he is supposed to have predicted a big movie career for him – if he could stop goofily waggling his head around. And that’s what Clooney did. It’s not as simple as that, of course, but mannerisms have to be controlled – very difficult if they become part of the electric zing of what’s made you a star up to that point. You’ve got to cultivate a certain stillness and centredness if you’re going to be plausible in many different roles as you grow into your 30s and 40s, like ex-Mouseketeer Ryan Gosling.
Perry made some palatable romantic comedies, such as the likable misadventure Three to Tango and the muchliked 17 Again which has a special piquant significance for Perry – who plays a disillusioned middle-aged guy who is reincarnated as a teenager played by Zac Efron.
Perry was a tremendous performer who could have developed as a great character actor and writer in the movies if the industry wasn’t so hidebound by genre and expectations and IP. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so superb in Seinfeld and Veep, is now blossoming as a character player in the movies of Nicole Holofcener and others. It could have been Perry. But any one of the Friends episodes puts him in the hall of fame. It’s cinema’s loss.