(CNN) – Matthew Perry’s audition for the role that made him a superstar may have been divinely inspired.
Perry, who died this Saturday at the age of 54, said in his autobiography, published in 2022, that three weeks before auditioning for the role of Chandler Bing in the famous series “Friends,” he read a news report in his small apartment in Los Angeles . of actor Charlie Sheen in the newspaper.
“I said that Sheen was in trouble again for something, but I remember thinking, ‘What does he care? He’s famous,'” Perry wrote in “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” “Out of nowhere, I fell to my knees, closed my eyes and prayed. I had never done that before.”
Perry said his prayer was simple. He simply asked, “God, you can do whatever you want with me. Just make me famous.”
“Three weeks later I got the role on Friends. And God certainly kept his end of the bargain, but the Almighty, being the Almighty, had not forgotten the first part of that prayer either,” Perry wrote.
Perry narrowly missed out on playing Chandler in Friends.
It was 1994 and the actor said he was looking for work after his “terrible” manager told him he had “no money.”
“So I called my agent and said, ‘You have to get me any job, any job you can,'” Perry recalled during an interview on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in 2015. “It just happened to be this year that ‘Friends’ was filmed, but I was off the market because I took a job on a pilot called ‘LAX 2194,’ which was about the baggage handlers at the Los Angeles airport that year 2194.”
Then he got the script for a show that was then called “Friends Like Us,” he said.
“It was hilarious and cool,” Perry said. “There was a role that was perfect for me and it was driving me crazy that I couldn’t appear for it. [el] Baggage Handler Program. It drove me crazy.
Fortunately, the television executives who saw “LAX 2194” thought it was terrible, explained Perry, who was then free to continue the Chandler role that had made him famous.
Perry often said that the series changed his life and permanently reunited him with his colleagues Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer.
The actor had an emotional moment while talking about when he and his castmates reunited for the HBO Max special “Friends: The Reunion” in May 2021. (HBO Max is owned by CNN’s parent company.)
“The best way to describe it is that after the series ended, at a party or other social gathering, if one of us ran into another, there was nothing left to do,” he explained. “That was the end of the night. You sat with this person all night and that was it.”
Cox teared up as Perry spoke.
“You apologized to the people you were with, but they had to understand that you had met someone special to you and that you would be talking to that person for the rest of the night,” he added added. “And that’s how it worked.”