Inside Matthew Perry's Bond With His Fellow Friends Stars

Matthew Perry’s ‘Friends’ Co-Stars Mourn His Death

Friends premiered 30 years ago.

That number feels impossibly high and yet also completely inconsequential, considering how Matthew Perry's sudden death on Oct. 28, 2023, made so many people feel as if they'd lost someone who was still playing an active role in their lives.

Cue the catharsis in the form of Chandler Bing appreciators everywhere wondering whether the news could be any more tragic.

But while countless fans felt connected to Perry in some way, mostly from his Emmy-nominated run on Friends but also from a series of other characters the multifaceted actor inhabited over the course of his four-decade career, there were only so many people who knew him. Only so many who were actually there to witness his undeniable talent up close and watch him struggle through the life-threatening lows that Perry himself was surprised to have survived.

For 10 years, it was Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer who saw Perry almost every day, who laughed with him, loved him and were inevitably very worried about him.

And while more personal memories were shared over the days, weeks and months that followed, it wasn't surprising that the surviving five Friends chose to release a joint statement at first—a way of not only paying tribute to Perry but also to honor their enduring status as a known unit.

"We are all so utterly devastated by the loss of Matthew," Aniston, Cox, Kudrow, LeBlanc and Schwimmer said in a statement to E! News Oct. 30, 2023. "We were more than just cast mates. We are a family. There is so much to say, but right now we're going to take a moment to grieve and process this unfathomable loss.

"In time we will say more, as and when we are able. For now, our thoughts and our love are with Matty's family, his friends, and everyone who loved him around the world."

In his memoir, which much like the author himself was simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, Perry remembered the day when Aniston came into his dressing room to let him know she knew he'd been drinking.

He got a sober companion to keep him dry at work, he continued, but on another occasion—after he showed up to set and didn't even notice he was slurring his lines, a mix of alcohol and "some kind of medication" from the night before kicking in—"everybody from the show" confronted him.

They asked what he was going to do, and he promised to "fix it." Instead, he went to go shoot the movie Serving Sara and his substance abuse only escalated, until he finally ended up in treatment in early 2001. He watched ex-girlfriend Julia Roberts win her Best Actress Oscar for Erin Brockovich from in-patient rehab that March, cracking the room up when he announced, "I'll take you back," during her speech. 

And Perry was still in rehab, he wrote, when Monica and Chandler's wedding episode aired on May 17, 2001.

The following year, the six leads jointly negotiated their landmark $1 million per episode contract. Perry shared that the ninth season of Friends, which aired from September 2002 to May 2003, was his only completely sober season. (And, not coincidentally, it was the season he scored his sole Emmy nomination.)

He also admittedly "felt nothing" while everyone else was bawling after they wrapped the series finale in 2004, not knowing if that was due to the detox opioid he was taking at the time or if he was "just generally dead inside."

They continued to hang out post-Friends, the selfie of all six of them that Aniston chose for her first Instagram post coming close to breaking the Internet in 2019, 15 years after Monica and Chandler moved to the 'burbs.

And they also kept showing up in each other's projects: Cox guest-starred on Perry's sitcom Go On, he and Aniston visited Cox's Cougar Town, Schwimmer played an extra version of himself on LeBlanc's Episodes and Cox, LeBlanc, Perry and Schwimmer popped up on Web Therapy with Kudrow.

"He's so sweet," Cox told Conan O'Brien of Perry in 2013. And "he's so funny. When I worked with him on Friends, he literally gave me my personality for 10 years."

When Perry joined Instagram in 2020, Aniston welcomed him with a nod to Monica and Rachel's lightning round loss to Joey and Chanandler Bong. "I'm shocked Matty is the last to join Instagram, considering he was a uh… umm… oh crap," she wrote. "Oh! A computer processing TRANSPONSTER."

"It's funny, when we do get together, it's like no time has passed," LeBlanc told People. "We pick up right where we left off."

Yet the trip down memory lane was also "brutal" for various reasons, Aniston told Lowe, explaining, "It's nostalgic in a way that's kind of also a little melancholy. 'Cause a lot has changed and we have all gone down different roads, some easy and some not so easy for each of us."

While they were making Friends, Perry kept the direst details of his condition to himself, not only to save face or because he was in denial, but because he didn't want to screw it up for everyone else.

"I was the injured penguin," he wrote, "but I was determined to not let these wonderful people, and this show, down." Though, he added, addiction could still win the day, such as the time he dozed off on the Central Perk couch and LeBlanc nudged him awake before he missed his cue.

"Secrets kill you," Perry reflected to Sawyer last year. "Secrets kill people like me."

The fact that he had problems was not a secret on the Friends set. But when they worked together, "I didn't really try to intervene or confront him, because the little I knew about addiction was that his sobriety was out of my hands," Kudrow wrote. "And yet, I would have periods of wondering if I was wrong for not doing more, not doing something."

However, she was aware of how addiction could consume a person. "So," she explained, "I just focused on Matthew, who could make me laugh so hard every day, and once a week, laugh so hard I cried and couldn't breathe."

Perry was the reason they're all laughing in the fountain in Friends' opening credits, Kudrow recalled, noting that he was the one who lifted them up during that grueling nighttime shoot and continued to do so time after time.

Maybe it's only hindsight talking now, but there's an elegiac tone to Kudrow's foreword, though she was commenting on a life still in progress. She was obviously one of many who hoped Perry had made it to the other side of his struggles and was there to stay.

But for all the brushes with death that pockmarked the actor's 20s, 30s and 40s, no one was ready to say goodbye to him at 54.

Thinking about his legacy when his book came out, Perry said that he wanted to be remembered primarily for his efforts to help others who struggled with addiction, and writing his memoir was part of that.

"People have just loved it," he told E! News when the book came out in November 2023. "I shied away from nothing and I told the truth and the biggest thing was, the goal was, to help people and I know of a lot of people already who have been helped by it."

He also, incidentally, helped the people who loved him most understand him a bit better before it was too late.

Keep reading to see more photos of the Friends stars reuniting over the years: