Matthew Perry

Matthew Langford Perry was born on 19 August 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His mother, Suzanne Marie Langford, born in 1943, was a Canadian journalist who served as press secretary to the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. His father, John Bennett Perry, born in 1941, was an American actor and model whose face was familiar to television viewers from commercials, including a long-running Old Spice campaign, and who worked steadily in film and television for decades. The two had married young, and the marriage did not last.

Perry's parents separated when he was about a year old. His mother later married the Canadian broadcast journalist Keith Morrison, who became a fixture of American television news, and Perry was raised mainly by his mother and stepfather in Ottawa, Ontario, with shorter spells in Toronto and Montreal. He had four younger maternal half-siblings, Caitlin, Emily, Will and Madeline, and a younger paternal half-sister, Maria. He remembered a household that encouraged him: his siblings, he wrote, would stand and applaud his early performances.

He also remembered feeling like a guest in his own family. Sent back and forth between Ottawa and Los Angeles as a child, he described himself in his memoir as a boy who was "so often on the outside looking in", still up in the clouds on a flight to somewhere else, unaccompanied. By the age of 10 he was acting out. He stole money, smoked, let his schoolwork slide, and, in an incident he retold for the rest of his life, got into a schoolyard fight with a fellow pupil, Justin Trudeau, who went on to become prime minister of Canada. Perry told the story as comedy, and Trudeau responded in the same spirit years later by publicly offering a rematch. Perry attributed the misbehaviour to a sense that he no longer belonged once his mother began a second family.

Tennis absorbed him for several years. He practised obsessively, sometimes for as much as 10 hours a day, and became one of the top-ranked junior players in Canada, with a plausible route towards a professional career. That route closed when he moved to Los Angeles at 15 to live with his father. The competition in southern California was far tougher than anything he had faced at home, his ranking did not follow him, and the ambition faded. Acting took its place almost immediately.

Two small biographical details followed him through his fame. The top of the middle finger on his right hand was missing, the result, by widely repeated accounts, of a door accident when he was a small child, and eagle-eyed viewers noticed it for years afterwards. He was also frequently confused with other people who shared his surname or his name. He was not related to the actor Luke Perry, and he had no family connection to Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, the nineteenth century United States Navy officer whose expedition forced the opening of Japan, a man whose name still dominates search results in Japan and in American history classes.

Alcohol entered his life early. Perry later wrote that he began drinking at 14 and was drinking every day by the time he turned 18. At the time it looked to those around him like ordinary teenage excess in a boy who was funny, popular and ambitious. He came to describe it as the beginning of an illness that shaped the next four decades.

Perry's schooling took place in two very different worlds. In Ottawa he attended Rockcliffe Park Public School and then Ashbury College, a private school in the city that also took boarders. It was a conventional, well-regarded education in a diplomatic and political neighbourhood, and it was the backdrop to his years as a serious junior tennis player, when school came second to the court.

After the move to Los Angeles at 15, he enrolled at the Buckley School, a college-preparatory school in Sherman Oaks, and graduated in 1987. Buckley had a strong performing arts tradition and a student body used to the film industry, and it was there that Perry began to study acting seriously rather than as a hobby.

Outside school he took improvisational comedy classes at L.A. Connection in Sherman Oaks, a small theatre and training company that put teenagers on stage in front of paying audiences. The training suited him. The skills it taught, fast rhythm, listening, the ability to find the joke inside a line of dialogue, became the foundation of the performance style that later made him famous.

Perry did not attend university. By his late teens he was auditioning regularly and taking paid television work, and his education from that point on happened on sets and in casting rooms. He continued to treat the craft as something to be studied, returning to the stage at intervals throughout his career, including a summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1993 and later runs in London and off-Broadway.

Perry's first credited appearance came in 1979, as a child, in an episode of the police drama 240-Robert, a series that featured his father. It was a small part and not the start of a continuous career, but it planted the idea that the work was available to him.

Once he was living in Los Angeles and studying at Buckley, he began auditioning in earnest. Guest spots followed on Not Necessarily the News in 1983, Charles in Charge in 1985 and Silver Spoons in 1986. In 1987 he was cast as Chazz Russell in the sitcom Second Chance, a curious science-fiction-flavoured comedy that was retooled mid-run and renamed Boys Will Be Boys, with the stories rebuilt around Perry's teenage character. It was his first regular role and his first experience of a show being reinvented around him.

He made his film debut in 1988 in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. The following year he took a three-episode arc on Growing Pains as Sandy, a college friend and boyfriend of Carol Seaver whose death in a drunk driving crash gave the series one of its most remembered dramatic turns. The role showed that the young comic actor could carry a sad story, and it is still cited by viewers who first noticed him there.

The early 1990s brought a run of series that did not last. In 1990 he was a regular on the CBS sitcom Sydney, playing the younger brother of Valerie Bertinelli's title character. In 1991 he appeared on Beverly Hills, 90210 as Roger Azarian, a troubled classmate. In 1993 he took the lead in the ABC sitcom Home Free. None of them ran long, and by his early twenties Perry had the reputation of a reliable young actor attached to shows that kept being cancelled.

The last of those near misses changed his life. Perry had committed to a pilot called LAX 2194, a comedy set in the baggage handling department of a Los Angeles airport two centuries in the future, and the commitment initially made him unavailable for another pilot then casting under the title Six of One. When LAX 2194 collapsed, he was free to read for the other show. Six of One became Friends.

Perry was cast as Chandler Bing, the sardonic data processor with a nervous streak, and at 24 he was the youngest of the six leads. The series began on NBC in September 1994 and became one of the defining television programmes of its era, running for ten seasons and 236 episodes until May 2004. After making the pilot, while the cast waited to find out whether the show would air, Perry spent the summer of 1993 acting at the Williamstown Theatre Festival alongside Gwyneth Paltrow.

What he did with Chandler was more distinctive than the writing alone. Perry found a rhythm of stressed and unstressed words, the emphasis landing early in a sentence rather than at the punchline, that turned ordinary lines into jokes. The construction that became his signature, the incredulous "could I be any more" formulation, was imitated and quoted for decades and passed into everyday speech. Underneath the sarcasm he played a recognisable kind of man: frightened of intimacy, apologising for himself, funny as a defence. Critics repeatedly noted that he brought a strain of vulnerability to a role that could have been a collection of one-liners. In the later seasons Chandler married Monica Geller, played by Courteney Cox, and the show let him grow up on screen.

The six leads became famous at the same time and negotiated as a group, an approach that reshaped how ensemble casts were paid. Salaries rose in stages across the run, reaching a reported one million dollars an episode each for the ninth and tenth seasons. The residual income was larger still and has continued for decades; CNBC and other outlets reported that each of the six earned in the region of twenty million dollars a year from syndication and streaming, although Warner Bros., which controls the distribution rights, has declined to confirm the figures.

Recognition from the industry was more modest than the show's popularity suggested. Perry received one Primetime Emmy nomination for Friends, for outstanding lead actor in a comedy series in 2002. He spoke about the disparity with characteristic self-deprecation, and colleagues and critics have since argued that his work was undervalued precisely because it looked effortless.

Off camera, the ten years of Friends were also the years in which his addictions took hold. Perry wrote and said publicly that he arrived on set with severe hangovers, that he shook and sweated, and that during later seasons he was often drunk or using opioids while working. His weight rose and fell sharply from season to season, changes that viewers noticed at the time and that he later explained: when he was thin he was usually on pills, when he was heavier he was usually drinking. He said he had no memory of roughly three years of the show, a period he estimated as seasons three to six. His castmates staged an intervention and tried repeatedly to help him, without success, and he described their loyalty with gratitude for the rest of his life. He also wrote that he had a crush on Jennifer Aniston before the show began and asked her out, that she preferred to be friends, and that she was one of the first to confront him about his drinking.

The cast remained close after the finale. Perry's last television appearance was Friends: The Reunion, an unscripted special broadcast in May 2021 in which the six returned to a recreation of the sets. He was visibly unwell during the taping, having recently undergone dental surgery, and his speech was slower than viewers remembered, which prompted a wave of unkind online comment. He addressed it plainly afterwards, and the special ended up being a last public gathering of the group that had defined his working life.

The success of Friends gave Perry access to leading roles in studio comedies, and for a decade he spent his hiatuses making films. In Fools Rush In in 1997 he played a New York executive who marries Salma Hayek's character after a one-night stand in Las Vegas, a romantic comedy that has aged into one of his better-liked pictures and that gave him a lasting friendship with Hayek. In 1998 came Almost Heroes, a frontier comedy directed by Christopher Guest and released after the death of his co-star Chris Farley. Three to Tango in 1999, with Neve Campbell and Dylan McDermott, cast him as an architect mistaken for gay by his employer.

His biggest commercial success as a film lead was The Whole Nine Yards in 2000, in which he played a mild-mannered dentist whose new neighbour is a retired contract killer played by Bruce Willis. Perry's physical comedy, a great deal of falling over and panicking, carried the film, and it was a substantial hit. He reunited with Willis for the sequel, The Whole Ten Yards, in 2004, which was poorly reviewed and did not repeat the success. Between them came Serving Sara in 2002, with Elizabeth Hurley, a production that was paused when Perry entered rehabilitation.

Television kept offering him work of a different kind. He appeared as the attorney Todd Merrick in two episodes of Ally McBeal in 2002. The following year he took the role of Joe Quincy, a Republican lawyer hired as associate White House counsel, in Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing. The part required him to handle dense, fast dialogue in a drama with no laugh track, and it brought him two Primetime Emmy nominations for outstanding guest actor in a drama series, in 2003 and 2004. For many viewers it was the first evidence that he could do something quite different from Chandler.

In 2004 he made his directorial debut with an episode of the comedy-drama Scrubs, in which he also acted alongside his father. It was a small credit but one he was proud of, and it reflected a growing interest in the work behind the camera that later led him to create and produce his own series.

Later film work was intermittent. In 2006 he filmed Numb, playing a screenwriter with depersonalisation disorder, a project whose release was repeatedly delayed before it reached DVD in 2008. He starred in the independent film Birds of America in 2008. His most widely seen later picture was 17 Again in 2009, in which he played a disappointed 37-year-old who wakes up as his teenage self, played by Zac Efron. Reviews were mixed, with several critics arguing that Perry and Efron were not plausible as the same man, but the film was a box office success and introduced him to a younger audience.

Perry's first major post-Friends role was one of his best. In The Ron Clark Story, a television film that premiered on TNT in August 2006, he played the real-life teacher Ron Clark, who left a comfortable job in North Carolina to teach a difficult class in Harlem. The performance was warm and unshowy, and it brought him a Golden Globe nomination and a Primetime Emmy nomination for outstanding lead actor in a miniseries or movie. It remains the film people mean when they search for the one in which Matthew Perry plays a teacher.

From 2006 to 2007 he starred in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin's drama about the making of a late-night sketch series. Perry played the writer Matt Albie opposite Bradley Whitford's director Danny Tripp. The series arrived with enormous expectations, drew strong reviews for its two leads, and was cancelled after a single season of 22 episodes. Perry regarded it as some of his best work and was open about his disappointment at its failure to find an audience.

An unlikely second career in video games began with a talk show appearance. In 2009 Perry, a committed gamer, gave Ellen DeGeneres an Xbox 360 and a copy of Fallout 3 on her programme. The gesture reached the developers at Obsidian Entertainment, who cast him as the voice of Benny, the scheming casino boss who opens the story of Fallout: New Vegas in 2010. The role introduced him to millions of players who had never watched a sitcom, and tributes from the gaming world after his death were extensive.

He also turned to creating his own shows. Mr. Sunshine, an ABC sitcom based on his original idea, in which he played the manager of a San Diego sports arena undergoing a midlife crisis, ran from February to April 2011 before being cancelled after nine episodes. Perry co-created, co-wrote, executive produced and starred in it. An earlier dark comedy pilot written with Peter Tolan, The End of Steve, was not picked up by Showtime.

In 2012 he took the lead in the NBC comedy Go On, created by the former Friends writer and producer Scott Silveri. Perry played Ryan King, a sports radio host pushed into group therapy after the death of his wife, and the series balanced jokes with grief in a way that suited him. It ran for one season of 22 episodes. In the same period he began a recurring role on the CBS drama The Good Wife as Mike Kresteva, an ambitious and slippery political operator, appearing in 2012 and again in 2013. He also appeared in London in the 2000s in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago, his first significant stage work as an established star.

In 2014 Perry made his British television debut in The Dog Thrower, a one-off comedy shown on 1 May as part of Sky Arts' Playhouse Presents strand, playing a charismatic man who draws a crowd by throwing his dog in the air. It was a brief, odd piece of work that he clearly enjoyed.

His last substantial series was a revival of The Odd Couple, which ran on CBS from 2015 to 2017. Perry co-developed the show, co-wrote episodes, served as executive producer and starred as the slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison opposite Thomas Lennon's fastidious Felix Unger. The series ran for three seasons and 38 episodes. It was a deliberate return to the multi-camera sitcom form in which he had made his name, and it was made while he was managing serious health problems.

He devoted considerable energy in these years to a play he had written himself. The End of Longing, about four damaged people in Los Angeles, with Perry in the lead as an alcoholic named Jack, opened at the Playhouse Theatre in London on 11 February 2016. Reviews were mixed, but the limited run sold well. He rewrote the play and staged a second production off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, opening on 5 June 2017 with Jennifer Morrison in the cast; that version was poorly reviewed and closed on 1 July. Perry described the play as a personal message to the world, an exaggerated version of himself as a drunk, written for people like him and for the people who love them.

Television work in 2017 included a return as Mike Kresteva in The Good Fight, the spin-off from The Good Wife, and a dramatic turn as Ted Kennedy in the miniseries The Kennedys: After Camelot, opposite Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He was cast in Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up but withdrew in 2020 while recovering from broken ribs caused by CPR after a medical crisis. In May 2021 he took part in Friends: The Reunion, which proved to be his final screen appearance.

The last major work of his life was a book. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published by Flatiron Books on 1 November 2022 with a foreword by his Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow, was a memoir about addiction written with disarming bluntness. Perry described the hospital stays, the relapses, the money spent and the loneliness underneath the fame, and he narrated the audiobook himself in a voice noticeably altered by years of surgery and illness. It reached the bestseller lists of The New York Times and Amazon and was widely praised for its honesty, though some reviewers found its structure chaotic and its tone by turns boastful and raw.

The book also caused him trouble. In passages about the deaths of River Phoenix and other young actors, Perry asked in print why Keanu Reeves was still alive, a line that was reported widely and criticised as gratuitous. He apologised publicly, said he had chosen the name at random and admired Reeves, and asked for the passages to be removed from future printings. Perry said he had written the book above all in the hope that readers struggling with addiction would recognise themselves in it, and letters from those readers mattered to him more than the sales figures.

Perry held American citizenship by birth and Canadian citizenship through his mother, and he considered himself both. He grew up between Ottawa and Los Angeles, kept his Canadian connections through his family, and was claimed with affection by both countries after his death.

He dated the actress Yasmine Bleeth in 1995 and Julia Roberts from 1995 to 1996, a relationship that began when Roberts guest-starred on Friends in the episode broadcast after the Super Bowl. Perry wrote later that he ended it, and attributed the decision to a conviction that she would eventually leave him. He was with the actress Lizzy Caplan from 2006 to 2012, the longest of his publicly known relationships, and in November 2020 he became engaged to the literary manager Molly Hurwitz. The engagement ended in 2021. Other partners were reported in the press over the years, some of which he never discussed. Perry never married and had no children, and he wrote and spoke openly about wanting a family and about the ways his illness and his fear of abandonment prevented it.

He was a serious property owner. Homes he held at various times included a condominium at Sierra Towers bought from Elton John, a house in the Hollywood Hills, a house in Malibu and a cottage in Pacific Palisades. In 2017 he paid 20 million dollars for a penthouse at The Century in Los Angeles and sold it in 2021 for 21.6 million dollars. In June 2023 he bought a mid-century modern house in the Hollywood Hills. He lived in the Pacific Palisades house at the end of his life.

Friends and colleagues described a perfectionist who worried at small things. Perry admitted to spending many hours refining the message on his answering machine, and to running lines endlessly in search of a laugh he could hear in his head before anyone else did. The same obsessiveness had made him a formidable junior tennis player, and he kept a lifelong interest in the game, as well as in pickleball, poker and video games.

He spoke publicly about faith in his later years. Perry said he believed in God and described what he called a very close relationship, calling himself a seeker rather than a member of any denomination, and he attributed a turning point in his recovery to a moment of prayer during one of his worst periods. He also spoke about therapy, which he attended twice a week for around 30 years, and about the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsored others and attended thousands of meetings.

Perry's addictions were the central fact of his adult life, and he documented them himself in detail. He wrote that he became an alcoholic at 14 and was drinking daily by 18. The opioid problem began in 1997, when a jet ski accident led to a prescription for Vicodin. He liked the effect immediately, and the dose escalated until, by his own account, he was taking as many as 55 pills a day. His weight fell to 128 pounds, about 58 kilograms. He completed a 28-day programme at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation that year, the first of many attempts at treatment.

In May 2000 he was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with alcohol-induced pancreatitis. In February 2001 he paused production on both Friends and the film Serving Sara for two months to enter in-patient treatment for dependence on Vicodin, methadone, amphetamines and alcohol. He said in 2002 that he tried not to drink on the set of Friends but often arrived with severe hangovers, shaking and sweating. He later acknowledged that during the later seasons he was frequently drunk or high while filming, and that he retained no memory of about three years of the work.

The most dangerous episode came in 2018. A gastrointestinal perforation, which he attributed to opioid abuse, caused his colon to burst. He spent two weeks in a coma, five months in hospital and nine months with a colostomy bag. Doctors told his family that he had a two per cent chance of survival on admission, and he was placed on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine. He underwent 14 stomach surgeries in total, and the scarring and pain that followed fed the cycle again.

He described the lengths to which the illness drove him with unusual candour. He faked pain to obtain a prescription for 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone a day. He was receiving daily ketamine infusions at one point during treatment abroad. Propofol given in connection with a surgery stopped his heart for five minutes, and the CPR that revived him broke eight ribs, an injury that later cost him a role in Don't Look Up. On one occasion he paid 175,000 dollars for a private flight to Los Angeles to obtain drugs and, when doctors there refused, another 175,000 dollars to fly back to Switzerland the same night.

By 2022 he estimated that his addiction had cost him around nine million dollars, along with 15 stays in rehabilitation facilities, therapy twice a week for three decades and roughly 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He was clear that none of this was glamorous and repeatedly warned younger people against reading his story as an adventure.

Perry's sobriety was not continuous, and he said so. He had long stretches of recovery, including periods during the run of Friends, and relapses that he described without self-pity. In his memoir he wrote that he had been sober for about a year and a half at the time of writing. After his death his stepfather, Keith Morrison, said publicly that Perry had been sober for roughly 19 months. In his final year he was described by family and friends as being in a settled period, working out, playing pickleball and talking about the next stage of his life.

Perry turned his experience of addiction into public work long before he wrote about it. In July 2011 he went to Washington as a celebrity spokesperson for the National Association of Drug Court Professionals and lobbied members of Congress for continued funding for drug courts, which divert people with substance use disorders into supervised treatment instead of prison. He returned to the cause repeatedly, arguing that treatment was cheaper and more effective than incarceration and that people with addictions were ill rather than criminal.

In 2013 he converted his former Malibu mansion into Perry House, a sober living residence for men in early recovery. The facility operated from 2013 until 2015, when he sold the property and the services were relocated. In May 2013 the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy gave him its Champion of Recovery award for the project, and he met officials there to press the case for drug courts.

He also worked one to one, sponsoring people through Alcoholics Anonymous and taking calls from strangers at difficult hours. Friends and fellow members of recovery communities described him as unusually generous with his time, partly because he believed that helping another addict was the most reliable way of keeping himself well.

During the COVID-19 pandemic he launched an apparel line inspired by Friends and directed the proceeds to the World Health Organization's COVID-19 response fund. He supported other causes quietly, and his publishers said the memoir was written in part to reach readers living with depression or addiction.

Perry was consistent about how he wanted to be remembered. He said more than once that when he died he hoped the first thing mentioned would not be Friends, the Emmys or the films, but the people he had helped to get sober. That ambition shaped the final years of his life and the work carried on in his name afterwards.

Perry held two citizenships: American by birth, since he was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on 19 August 1969, and Canadian through his mother. He grew up between two countries and two households. His mother, Suzanne Langford, was a Canadian journalist who served as press secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau; his father, John Bennett Perry, was an American actor and model whose face was familiar to a generation of viewers from Old Spice commercials. His parents separated when he was about a year old, and his mother later married the Canadian broadcast journalist Keith Morrison, who became a fixture of American television as a correspondent on Dateline NBC. Perry was raised mostly in Ottawa, with spells in Toronto and Montreal, and attended Rockcliffe Park Public School and Ashbury College before moving to Los Angeles at 15 to live with his father. He had four younger maternal half-siblings, Caitlin, Emily, Will and Madeline, and a younger paternal half-sister, Maria. He was not related to the actor Luke Perry, a question that has followed both men for decades.

Before acting took over, tennis did. Perry practised for hours at a stretch, sometimes as many as ten hours a day, and became a nationally ranked junior player in Canada. He wrote later that the move to California ended any realistic hope of a professional career, because the standard there was far higher than anything he had faced at home. He also described starting to misbehave at around the age of ten, stealing money, smoking and letting his schoolwork slide, and told repeatedly the story of a childhood scuffle in which he beat up a fellow Ottawa pupil, Justin Trudeau, who would go on to become prime minister of Canada. Perry attributed the drift to a sense of not belonging, of being the child left over from his mother's first marriage once she began a second family. In his memoir he wrote that he was "so often on the outside looking in, still that kid up in the clouds on a flight to somewhere else, unaccompanied".

Perry never married and had no children, a fact he addressed openly and with some sadness in later interviews, saying he had wanted both. His documented relationships were few. He dated the actress Yasmine Bleeth in 1995 and Julia Roberts from 1995 to 1996, during the period when Roberts made her guest appearance on Friends, and he was with the actress Lizzy Caplan from 2006 to 2012, a relationship he kept notably private. In November 2020 he became engaged to the literary manager Molly Hurwitz; the engagement ended in 2021. He spoke in interviews about how his drinking and drug use had made sustained intimacy almost impossible, and about the loneliness that followed.

His homes were almost all in Los Angeles and several of them became well known. He owned a condominium in the Sierra Towers bought from Elton John, a house in the Hollywood Hills, a Malibu house that he later converted into a sober living facility, and a cottage in Pacific Palisades. In 2017 he bought a penthouse occupying the top floor of The Century in Century City for a reported 20 million dollars and sold it in 2021 for a reported 21.6 million dollars to the Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar. In June 2023, four months before his death, he bought a mid-century modern house in the Hollywood Hills. He died at the Pacific Palisades property.

Perry described himself as a believer. He said he had "a very close relationship" with God and called himself "a seeker", language drawn from the recovery traditions that shaped much of his adult life rather than from any particular denomination. He was, by his own account, a perfectionist with an obsessive streak, and liked to tell the story of spending hours rewriting and re-recording the outgoing message on his answering machine until the timing of the joke was exactly right. Friends and colleagues described the same quality in his work: a compulsive need to find the funniest possible version of a line.

His health was public because he made it so. Perry wrote in his memoir that he was drinking at 14 and drinking daily by 18. He became addicted to the painkiller Vicodin after a jet ski accident in 1997 while filming, and completed a 28 day programme at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation that year. At his worst he said he was taking as many as 55 Vicodin pills a day, and his weight fell to about 128 pounds, roughly 58 kilograms, a change visible to viewers across the middle seasons of Friends. In May 2000 he was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with alcohol induced pancreatitis. In February 2001 he paused work on both Friends and the film Serving Sara for two months to enter in-patient treatment for addictions to Vicodin, methadone, amphetamines and alcohol. He said he had no memory at all of three years of his work on the show.

The physical cost accumulated. In 2018 a gastrointestinal perforation, which he attributed to opioid abuse, left him in hospital for five months. His colon burst, he spent two weeks in a coma, was placed on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, and doctors told his family he had a two per cent chance of survival. He used a colostomy bag for nine months afterwards. He described faking pain to obtain a prescription of 1,800 milligrams of hydrocodone a day, receiving daily ketamine infusions, and having his heart stop for five minutes after being given propofol during surgery, the resulting chest compressions breaking eight ribs. In 2022 he estimated that he had spent about 9 million dollars trying to get sober, across 14 stomach surgeries, 15 stays in rehabilitation, weekly therapy twice over for 30 years and roughly 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Around the publication of the memoir in late 2022 he said he had been sober for about 18 months, and he was candid that he did not regard the fight as finished.

Two smaller physical details are asked about often enough to be worth answering plainly. Perry was missing the tip of the middle finger on his right hand, the result of a childhood accident in which a door closed on it, something he mentioned in interviews without embarrassment. And the slurred, effortful speech that worried viewers during Friends: The Reunion in 2021 was, he said afterwards, the result of emergency dental surgery on the day of filming rather than of any relapse.

The longest running controversy of Perry's life was his own conduct while working, and he was the first to raise it. He admitted that he had tried to avoid drinking on the Friends set but often arrived with severe hangovers, shaking and sweating, and that in later seasons he was frequently drunk or high while filming. His castmates staged an intervention that did not work. Some commentators, after his death and after the memoir, argued that a production earning enormous sums had a duty to stop and get its actor well, and that the industry's tolerance amounted to enabling. Others, including Perry himself, pointed out that nobody could have forced him into recovery and that his colleagues did try, privately and repeatedly. He was consistent in refusing to blame Friends or its makers for his illness.

The memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published in November 2022, was a bestseller and also the source of the sharpest criticism he faced. A passage about Keanu Reeves, in which Perry wondered aloud why Reeves was still alive when River Phoenix and Chris Farley were not, provoked a strong backlash. Perry apologised, said he had picked Reeves's name at random because he lived on his street, called the remark a mistake and said it would be removed from future printings. Readers and reviewers also questioned his decision to publish private conversations with colleagues, including an account of Jennifer Aniston confronting him about his drinking and a description of a long ago encounter with his former Sydney co-star Valerie Bertinelli, who was married at the time. Defenders of the book argued that a recovery memoir without the humiliating parts would have been worthless, and that Perry's willingness to make himself the villain of most of his own stories was the point.

His telling of the Justin Trudeau story attracted a smaller but persistent objection. Perry repeated on talk shows that he and a friend had beaten up the future prime minister at school in Ottawa, framing it as childish jealousy of a boy who was good at everything, and later joked about settling it in a charity boxing match. Critics said a bullying anecdote was being played for laughs. Perry's own framing was that the episode reflected badly on him, not on Trudeau.

Perry's professional work drew ordinary critical disagreement rather than scandal. Reviewers were divided on 17 Again in 2009, with some arguing that he was miscast and that it strained belief for Zac Efron's teenager to grow into him. His play The End of Longing, which he wrote and starred in, had a commercially successful limited run in London in 2016 despite mixed notices, then closed quickly off-Broadway in 2017 after poor reviews. Perry acknowledged the reception and defended the work as deliberately uncomfortable, describing it as "a personal message to the world, an exaggerated form of me as a drunk".

The largest controversy came after his death and was not of his making. The finding that he died from the acute effects of ketamine, at a time when he was receiving supervised ketamine assisted psychotherapy for depression and anxiety, put a fast growing branch of mental health treatment under scrutiny. Practitioners and patient groups argued that ketamine, administered in a clinic under proper monitoring, has genuine evidence behind it for treatment resistant depression and that Perry's death involved illegally supplied drugs taken outside any clinical setting. Critics of the industry countered that loosely regulated clinics, telehealth prescribing and cash paying celebrity patients had created exactly the grey market that killed him. Federal prosecutors drew the same distinction, stressing that the lethal doses came from a criminal supply chain rather than from his treatment.

The criminal case that followed produced its own arguments about fairness. Five people, including Perry's live-in personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, two doctors, Salvador Plasencia and Mark Chavez, the television director Erik Fleming and the dealer Jasveen Sangha, pleaded guilty. Evidence made public included a text message in which Plasencia asked Chavez, "I wonder how much this moron will pay", and the prosecutors' finding that Perry had paid the two doctors around 55,000 dollars in cash in his final two months. When the sentences came, ranging from eight months of house arrest for Chavez to 15 years in prison for Sangha, some observers said the medical defendants had been treated too leniently given the trust they had abused, while others noted that the guilty pleas had spared a long trial and that the court had drawn a clear line between the doctors who exploited a sick man and the dealer who supplied the fatal doses. Defence lawyers argued in mitigation that their clients had not intended Perry's death and that his addiction was decades old. Nothing in the case suggested any wrongdoing by Perry himself beyond his illness.

By the middle of the 2010s Perry had settled into a pattern of working when he was well enough and withdrawing when he was not. He co-developed and starred in the CBS revival of The Odd Couple as Oscar Madison from 2015 to 2017, wrote and performed his play The End of Longing in London and New York, returned as the lawyer Mike Kresteva in The Good Fight in 2017 and played Ted Kennedy in the mini-series The Kennedys: After Camelot the same year. It was the last sustained run of acting work he would complete.

The 2018 medical emergency changed everything. A gastrointestinal perforation, which he linked directly to opioid use, put him in hospital for five months, two weeks of them in a coma, and left him using a colostomy bag for nine months. He emerged with a body that no longer tolerated the life he had been living and with a story he decided to tell. In 2020 he withdrew from Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up because of ribs broken during CPR, and effectively stopped taking acting jobs.

His last screen appearance was as himself, in Friends: The Reunion, filmed in 2021 and broadcast in May that year. Viewers noticed that he seemed unwell and that his speech was unclear, and the reaction was widely discussed; he explained afterwards that he had undergone emergency dental surgery hours before the taping. The special was, for all that, a reunion he clearly wanted to be part of, and it placed him back beside the five people with whom he had spent his twenties.

The memoir became the centre of his final years. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, with a foreword by Lisa Kudrow, was published on 1 November 2022 and reached the bestseller lists of both Amazon and The New York Times. Perry gave a long round of interviews to support it, including a televised conversation with Diane Sawyer and a radio interview with Tom Power on CBC's Q, and used almost all of them to make the same argument: that addiction is an illness rather than a moral failure, and that he had written the book for people who were still in it and for the people who love them. He said he hoped readers would take from it that recovery was possible even after everything he had described.

In his last year he lived quietly. He was photographed playing pickleball, posted intermittently on social media under the affectionate nickname Mattman, worked on his sobriety and on plans for the charitable work he wanted to do, and in June 2023 bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. He was also receiving ketamine assisted psychotherapy for depression and anxiety; his last known supervised infusion took place in the week before he died, and the medical examiner later concluded that the ketamine in his body at death could not have come from it, because the drug clears the blood within hours. On 28 October 2023 he was found unresponsive in the jacuzzi at his Pacific Palisades home and was pronounced dead at 4.17 pm. He was 54.

Matthew Perry died on Saturday 28 October 2023 at his home in the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles. He had spent part of the day playing pickleball and was alone at the house when he was found unresponsive in the jacuzzi in the early evening. Emergency services were called, and he was pronounced dead at the scene at 4.17 pm. He was 54 years old.

The news broke within hours through American entertainment media and was quickly confirmed by law enforcement and by representatives for Perry's family, who asked for privacy. <cite index="3-1,3-4">He was declared dead after being found unresponsive at his home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, and investigators performed the autopsy the following day.</cite> No cause was given at the time, and the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner deferred its finding pending toxicology results.

The response was immediate and global. The five surviving members of the Friends cast, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer, issued a joint statement describing themselves as more than castmates and saying they were devastated. Warner Bros. Television, NBC and the streaming service Max paid tribute, and Max added an on-screen memorial card to the series. Tributes also came from Canadian public figures, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had been a schoolmate of Perry's in Ottawa, and from co-stars including Salma Hayek Pinault, Zac Efron, Bradley Whitford and Thomas Lennon. Fans gathered at the Greenwich Village apartment building whose exterior was used in Friends, leaving flowers and notes.

Perry's funeral was held on 3 November 2023 at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles, where he was buried. His mother, father and stepfather attended, along with all five of his Friends co-stars. The Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush song "Don't Give Up" was played at the service. Perry had been attached to the song and had referenced it when signing copies of his memoir, a book he said he had published in part for readers living with depression and addiction.

On 15 December 2023 the medical examiner released the autopsy findings. <cite index="0-0,0-2">Perry's cause of death was recorded as the acute effects of ketamine, with drowning and coronary artery disease also listed as contributing factors.</cite> <cite index="2-0">The effects of buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid use disorder, were also listed as contributing.</cite> <cite index="1-0">The report noted that high levels of ketamine were found in his postmortem blood specimens, and that the main lethal effects would have been cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression.</cite> The manner of death was ruled an accident. Perry had been receiving ketamine-assisted psychotherapy for anxiety and depression, but his last known clinical infusion was more than a week before he died, and investigators concluded that the ketamine in his system could not have come from that session, because the drug is cleared from the body far more quickly.

Those findings led to a criminal investigation into how Perry obtained the drug. In August 2024, five people were charged, among them his live-in personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, two doctors, and two dealers. All five eventually pleaded guilty. <cite index="6-0">Jasveen Sangha, known as the "Ketamine Queen", was sentenced in April 2026 to 15 years in prison for her role in the case.</cite> <cite index="9-0,9-1">Iwamasa was sentenced on 27 May 2026 to 41 months in federal prison for conspiring to distribute ketamine to Perry, in the final sentencing of the prosecution.</cite>

Chandler Bing remains one of the most recognisable comic performances in television history. Perry built it out of timing, self-deprecation and an emphatic, upward-turning delivery, the "could I be any more..." construction that audiences imitated for thirty years, and he gave the sarcastic best friend something the archetype rarely has: visible fear of being unloved. Because Friends has never been off the air in some form, the performance has kept finding new audiences, and much of the writing about Perry after his death came from people who had watched him for the first time long after the show ended.

He wanted the other half of his life to count for more. In July 2011 he lobbied the United States Congress as a celebrity spokesperson for the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, arguing for funding for drug courts that send people into treatment instead of prison. In 2013 he received a Champion of Recovery award from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, in part for opening Perry House, a men's sober living facility in his former Malibu mansion, which operated from 2013 until he sold the property in 2015. During the COVID-19 pandemic he launched a Friends themed apparel line with proceeds going to the World Health Organization's relief fund. He said more than once that he would rather be remembered for helping people get sober than for anything he had done on camera.

That wish is now institutional. The Matthew Perry Foundation was established through the National Philanthropic Trust within days of his death, with the stated aim of dismantling the stigma that keeps people from asking for help. Its work has included grassroots recovery grants to frontline organisations, support for Healing Appalachia, a large recovery focused sober music festival, a partnership with the National Hockey League on a campaign called Goals for Recovery, and the Matthew Perry Foundation Fellowship in Addiction Medicine, announced with Massachusetts General Hospital in January 2025 for the 2025-2026 academic year to train a specialist physician in addiction medicine.

The immediate reaction to his death was enormous. The five surviving main cast members of Friends issued a joint statement describing themselves as a family rather than colleagues, and Max added an on-screen memorial card to the series. His funeral was held on 3 November 2023 at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles, where he was buried; his mother, father and stepfather attended, along with all five of his Friends co-stars. The Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush song "Don't Give Up", which Perry loved and had referenced when signing copies of his memoir, was played. Tributes continued in the years that followed: on 19 August 2025, what would have been his 56th birthday, his Fools Rush In co-star Salma Hayek posted a public tribute to him.

His estate has kept his name in the news. Reports at the time of his death estimated his fortune at around 120 million dollars, much of it built on Friends and its continuing royalties, and probate filings showed he had left a will executed in 2009 directing his assets into a trust named after Alvy Singer, the lead character in Annie Hall. Reported beneficiaries included his parents, his stepfather Keith Morrison, a half-sister and a former girlfriend. All such figures should be read as estimates rather than confirmed accounts. In May 2026 Heritage Auctions announced a charity sale of his art, Friends memorabilia and personal effects in partnership with the foundation, including an original work by Banksy, and the auction took place on 5 June 2026 with net proceeds going to the foundation's recovery programmes.

The criminal case arising from his death has had consequences beyond his own story. Federal prosecutors in the Central District of California treated it as a test of whether the people who profit from a famous patient's addiction can be held individually responsible, and all five defendants pleaded guilty. Doctors Plasencia and Chavez both gave up their medical licences. For advocates of treatment reform, the case demonstrated how easily a legitimate therapy can be diverted into a cash market; for Perry's family and foundation, it was an argument for the education and access to care they had already set out to fund.

One practical note for readers arriving from a search engine. Matthew Perry the actor is frequently confused with Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the nineteenth century United States Navy officer whose expedition to Japan led to the opening of Japanese ports to American trade, and whose name accounts for many of the search queries about Japan, Yokohama and American history that appear alongside the actor's. They were not related, and the actor had no connection to the naval officer beyond a shared name.

Perry was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards and never won one. The first came in 2002, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, the only acting nomination of his Friends career. Two followed in 2003 and 2004 for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, both for his performance as the Republican lawyer Joe Quincy in The West Wing, a role that showed his range to people who had only seen him in comedy. The fourth, in 2006, was for playing the teacher Ron Clark in the television film The Ron Clark Story, which also brought him a Golden Globe nomination. He shared in the Screen Actors Guild Award won by the Friends ensemble for outstanding performance by a comedy cast in 1996, and in the many popular awards the show collected during its run.

His most personal recognition had nothing to do with acting. In May 2013 the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy gave him a Champion of Recovery award, citing his advocacy for drug courts and his decision to turn his Malibu house into Perry House, a sober living home for men. He described it as the honour he valued most, consistent with his repeated statement that helping other people get sober mattered more to him than his career.

Since his death his name has been attached to work in the field he cared about. The Matthew Perry Foundation Fellowship in Addiction Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, announced in January 2025, funds the training of a physician specialising in addiction, one of a small number of such fellowships in the United States. His memoir, which he framed as a public service as much as a life story, remains his most widely read piece of advocacy.

Television - 240-Robert (1979), his first credited role, as a child actor - Charles in Charge (1985), Silver Spoons (1986), guest appearances - Second Chance, later Boys Will Be Boys (1987-1988), as Chazz Russell - Growing Pains (1989), three episodes as Sandy - Sydney (1990), as the brother of Valerie Bertinelli's character - Beverly Hills, 90210 (1991), as Roger Azarian - Home Free (1993), lead role - Friends (1994-2004), as Chandler Bing - Ally McBeal (2002), two episodes as Todd Merrick - The West Wing (2003), as Joe Quincy - Scrubs (2004), one episode, which he also directed, appearing with his father - The Ron Clark Story (2006), television film, title role - Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006-2007), as Matt Albie - Mr. Sunshine (2011), which he co-created, co-wrote and executive produced - Go On (2012-2013), as Ryan King - The Good Wife (2012-2013), as Mike Kresteva - The Dog Thrower (2014), Sky Arts, his British television debut - The Odd Couple (2015-2017), as Oscar Madison, also co-developer and writer - The Good Fight (2017), as Mike Kresteva - The Kennedys: After Camelot (2017), as Ted Kennedy - Friends: The Reunion (2021), as himself, his final screen appearance

Film - A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988), his film debut - Fools Rush In (1997), with Salma Hayek - Almost Heroes (1998), with Chris Farley - Three to Tango (1999), with Neve Campbell - The Whole Nine Yards (2000), with Bruce Willis - Serving Sara (2002) - The Whole Ten Yards (2004), with Bruce Willis - Numb (released on DVD in 2008) - Birds of America (2008) - 17 Again (2009), with Zac Efron

Theatre - Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet, London - The End of Longing, which he wrote and starred in, Playhouse Theatre, London, from February 2016, and Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York, from June 2017

Video games - Fallout: New Vegas (2010), as the voice of Benny

Books - Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir, with a foreword by Lisa Kudrow, Flatiron Books, 1 November 2022