The actor Matthew Perry, known worldwide for his role as Chandler Bing, the sarcastic office worker and friend of Monica Geller in the television comedy Friends, was found dead this Saturday. This was exclusively confirmed by TMZ, who said Los Angeles, California police found him drowned in his hot tub after 4:10 p.m. He was 54 years old. Police have confirmed they are investigating the death. According to media sources such as TMZ and Page Six, Perry exercised in the morning, returned home and sent his assistant to run an errand. It was she who found him when she returned a few hours later and called emergency services.
In the 234 episodes of “Friends” broadcast between 1994 and 2004, he became the funny, ironic, amorous and sometimes hot-tempered Chandler Bing, who, thanks to his peers, brought Perry worldwide fame at the age of just 24. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc. He had already been active in the world of acting for almost a decade, but thanks to the series he achieved a level of fame that actually followed him until the end of his days. Since the end of the fiction, Perry has been involved in a few smaller projects or individual chapters of The Good Wife or Cougar Town.
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Son of actor John Bennett Perry and Suzanne Marie Langford, who was press secretary to the late former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau – father of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – after his parents’ separation when he was barely months old, he lived between Montreal in Canada and Los Angeles, where he eventually settled. Perry began acting at the age of 10. When he began recording the series, he said he was consuming alcohol and drugs, but by the time he finished it at 34, “he was already in a lot of trouble.” He underwent physical changes that were visible to viewers, and admitted that his teammates have always helped him. His life was full of chiaroscuro, as he said in his biography “Friends, Lovers and the Terrible” (Contraluz, November 2022). “There were years when I was sober during that time. “Season 9 was the year I was sober the whole time,” he said in it. This was the first time he was nominated for an Emmy. In recent seasons he weighed 58 kilos and took 55 Vicodin tablets a day, a painkiller based on a synthetic opiate. “I didn’t know how to stop. I couldn’t stop because the disease and addiction are progressive. The older I got, the worse it got.” His relationship with substances was such that, he told BBC2, he doesn’t remember three whole seasons of the series. “I was away for a bit between the third and sixth seasons. “They were difficult years,” he admitted.
The actor also said in his memoirs that he underwent rehabilitation programs several times. In fact, he said he spent “about $9 million” on rehabilitation. All of this had, at times, left him feeling ridiculed, excluded and stigmatized. “My case suggests that there is still a lot of stigma around addiction and we still have to hide,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “I’m shy,” he explained in another interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “but participating in a series watched by 30 million viewers has made people aware of my problem.” That’s why the existence of clinics, that isolate you from the entire environment that doesn’t favor you, so important.”
From left to right the stars of “Friends”: Jennifer Aniston, David Schummer, Courteney Cox, Matt Leblanc, Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry.cordonpress
In that book, he also said that his colon ruptured in 2018, leaving him in a coma for two weeks and in the hospital for five months, as well as having to live with a colostomy bag for nine months. He had a 2% chance of survival. “They put me on what’s called an ECMO machine, which makes my heart and lungs work,” the actor wrote. “It was a desperate remedy. Nobody survives this.”
In the mid-1990s, Perry dated Julia Roberts. They met in her cameo appearance on the series, in the Thanksgiving double episode of the second season, in which she played an old school friend and exactly Chandler’s new romance, which then became the most watched of them with 53 million viewers. The chemistry continued even further and they dated between 1995 and 1996. He then spent a season with Yasmine Bleeth, one of the stars of Baywatch. He also had brief romances with Neve Campbell (from the Scream saga), Lauren Graham (Gilmore Girls) and Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex). As he explained in a 1997 interview with Entertainment Weekly: “If you have dinner with someone the next day, the whole country thinks you have a girlfriend, which is a little strange.” Even before Friends, I had no idea what When it comes to dating. So that makes it even more confusing. But worst case scenario, I have the best job in the world.” In 2019, Perry began a relationship with 27-year-old literary agent Molly Hurwitz, to whom he became engaged in 2020. They called off the engagement in 2021.