Perry, Matthew

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      Matthew Perry, ‘Friends’ Star, Dies at 54

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      He was known for playing the sarcastic but lovable Chandler Bing and for his struggles with drugs and alcohol, which he chronicled in a memoir.Matthew Perry, who gained sitcom superstardom as Chandler Bing on the show “Friends,” becoming a model of the ability to tease your pals as an expression of love, has died. He was 54.The death was confirmed by Capt. Scot Williams of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide division. He said the cause was not likely to be determined for some time, but there was no indication of foul play.Several news outlets reported, without a named source, that Mr. Perry was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his home in Los Angeles. He had publicly struggled with drinking and drug use for decades, leading to hospitalizations for a range of ailments. By his own account, he had spent more than half his life in treatment and rehab facilities.“Friends” ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. It chronicled the never-too-dramatic dramas and in-jokes and exploits of a group of six young friends living in New York City. Chandler was the yuppie of the group, with a well-paying white-collar job his friends did not entirely understand. He wore sweater vests but also moodily smoked cigarettes.Other “Friends” characters generated humor through their goofiness or haplessness; Chandler cracked jokes. He was often inspired by the airheadedness of his roommate and best friend, Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc), a struggling actor, and by the blunders of another buddy, Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), a paleontologist more competent in science than everyday life.During one episode, for example, Ross joined the group looking bizarrely tan and said he had gone to a tanning place that one of them had suggested. “Was that place the sun?” Chandler asked.The cast of “Friends” in the 1990s. Clockwise from bottom left, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller; Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani; Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay; David Schwimmer as Ross Geller; Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing; and Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green.NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesThat speech pattern — the sarcastic rhetorical question asked in a tone of mock disbelief — was typical of Chandler. He was known on the show for wondering things like “Could she be more out of my league?”Mr. Perry himself brought this bit to the show, and it became a familiar way for Americans to talk — proof of the status of “Friends” as one of the most popular shows in sitcom history.For a while Chandler was in a secret romance with another core member of the “Friends” group, Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), a chef. Ultimately, the two achieve happily stable monogamy, marry and move to the suburbs. (In the spirit of the show, distilled into its theme song, “I’ll Be There for You,” Chandler’s new home has a “Joey room” for his old roommate.) Their steps toward adulthood helped bring an end to the group’s post-adolescent idyll and, with that, the story of “Friends” itself.Mr. Perry, like his co-stars, eventually earned $1 million per episode. He was rich, famous and handsome. But behind the scenes of “Friends,” his substance abuse was already an issue.In his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Mr. Perry recalled Jennifer Aniston, who starred in the show as Rachel Green, coming to his trailer one day and saying, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that it was clear he had been drinking too much. “We can smell it,” she added.“The plural ‘we,’” he wrote about that moment, “hits me like a sledgehammer.”The whole cast confronted him at one point in his dressing room.A Jet Ski accident in 1997 helped set in motion Mr. Perry’s addiction to pain killers. A year and a half later, he was taking 55 pills a day. He checked into a rehab facility weighing 128 pounds. “Of course, ‘Matthew Perry is in rehab’ became a huge news story,” he wrote.Mr. Perry testified before a House subcommittee in Washington in 2013 in support of federal funding for drug treatment programs, including those for military veterans. His own struggles with addiction were well known. Paul Morigi/Associated Press for the National Association of Drug Court ProfessionalsIn the years to come, his addiction would lead to a “medical odyssey,” The New York Times wrote in a profile last year, including an exploded colon, a stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag and more than a dozen stomach surgeries, among other travails.Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay on “Friends,” wrote in her foreword to Mr. Perry’s memoir that the single question she was asked most about “Friends” was “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Matthew Langford Perry was born on Aug. 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Mass. His mother, Suzanne (Langford) Perry, worked as a press secretary for the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. His father, John Bennett Perry, was a character actor.His parents divorced when he was a baby, and Matty grew up largely with his mother and stepfather, Keith Morrison, in Ottawa. He was one of Canada’s top-ranked junior tennis players.When he was 15, he moved in with his father in Los Angeles, hoping to devote more time to tennis and leave behind unhappiness he felt about his place in his mother’s second family.After a couple of years in Los Angeles, Matthew decided that he had figured out what would make him happy.“Fame would change everything, and I yearned for it more than any other person on the face of the planet,” he wrote in his memoir. “I needed it. It was the only thing that would fix me. I was certain of it.”Mr. Perry in about 1988. “Fame would change everything, and I yearned for it more than any other person on the face of the planet,” he wrote in his memoir.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIn 1988, still a teenager, he made his film debut, starring alongside River Phoenix in “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.” He appeared on several sitcoms. It was clear that he was an up-and-coming actor — but he remained that way for several years. One day, when he was 24, alone in his small Los Angeles apartment, he got on his knees and prayed to become famous, no matter what else would happen to him in the process.Three weeks later, he was cast in “Friends.”Early on, Courteney Cox, whose career to that point had outpaced her fellow cast members’, announced to the group, “There are no stars here,” Mr. Perry recalled in his memoir. “This is an ensemble show. We’re all supposed to be friends.”Mr. Perry continued: “So we did what she suggested. From that first morning we were inseparable. We ate every meal together.”During his years on “Friends,” Mr. Perry starred in a number of movies that flopped commercially, like “Almost Heroes” (1998), with Chris Farley, and “Three to Tango” (1999). He got good reviews for his supporting role as a likable, beleaguered dentist in “The Whole Nine Yards” (2000), starring Bruce Willis.After “Friends,” Mr. Perry starred in a few more TV shows, like “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” (2006-07), written by Aaron Sorkin, and an adaptation of Neil Simon’s play “The Odd Couple” that ran on CBS from 2015 to 2017.In his memoir, Mr. Perry poignantly described struggles with self-esteem and commitment through several romantic relationships, including some with prominent actresses, like Julia Roberts. He never married or had children.He had several half siblings from his parents’ remarriages. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Since “Friends” went off the air, its fan base has only grown. The show has even helped people around the world learn English.Two years ago, Mr. Perry, by his own account newly sober, appeared in a televised reunion of the “Friends” cast, in which its stars revisited some of the show’s most famous sets, like the Central Perk coffee shop, to reminisce about old episodes.That came after years in which Mr. Perry resisted talking about “Friends.” He wrote in his memoir that he admired Kurt Cobain’s refusal to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a hit for Mr. Cobain’s group, Nirvana, and Led Zeppelin’s aversion to their anthem “Stairway to Heaven.”He did gain a new attitude toward publicly recalling his past thanks to writing, he told The Times last year. In a single interview, he spoke again and again about the idea that his confessional stories might help fellow addicts.“Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share,” he said, “I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Elisabeth Egan More

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      Mourning Matthew Perry at the ‘Friends’ Museum in New York

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      The day after the actor’s death, fans paid tribute at a storefront re-creation of the sitcom’s famous sets.Every night, Marnie Stein, an elementary school principal from Montreal, falls asleep to the lullaby of “Friends” streaming on her TV.At school, the decorations in the teachers’ lounge reference Central Perk, the Manhattan coffee shop where the show’s main characters held court. “All we do is quote ‘Friends,’” Stein said of her and her colleagues.So on Sunday afternoon, while on a trip to New York City with her daughter and best friend, Stein took a pilgrimage to a storefront at East 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue, where sets from the long-running sitcom have been recreated for fans in a two-floor tourist magnet that is part museum, part photo opportunity.After the news on Saturday night that Matthew Perry, one of the show’s lead actors, had died suddenly at his home in Los Angeles, the trip to the “Friends” Experience turned into a moment to pay tribute to the 54-year-old star, who had been open about his long battle with drug and alcohol addiction. No official cause of death has been released yet.“He was in pain and he had so many demons and he suffered for so long,” Stein said as “Friends” clips flashed on a screen behind her. “As I’m trying to come to terms with it, I hope he’s at peace.”Stein, 49, watched “Friends” from its early days, when it premiered on NBC in the mid-1990s and quickly became a pop culture touchstone, with its portrait of a close-knit group of 20-somethings navigating friendship and relationships. The show has maintained its cultural cachet into the streaming era, producing a legion of Gen Z fans who are just as eager to take a photograph alongside a recreation of the “Friends” fountain as their parents’ generation is. (Stein’s 22-year-old daughter, Maggie, is a fan, too.)A sardonic jokester with a mysterious job and a sometimes painful awkwardness when flirting, Perry’s character, Chandler Bing, was a central pillar of the show during its 10-season run, and his relationship with Courteney Cox’s character, Monica Geller, is one of the most beloved romantic arcs in TV history.A re-creation of the “Friends” Central Perk coffeehouse.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOutfits worn by the cast of “Friends.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn his recent memoir, in which he chronicled his road toward sobriety, Perry described the show as a “safe place” and a “touchstone of calm” for him. “It had given me a reason to get out of bed every morning,” he wrote.He also described the character as deeply personal to him. Chandler’s trademark way of talking — “Could she be more out of my league?” and “Could I be more sorry?” — came from a speech pattern he and his brothers took on in grade school.“From the day we first heard him embody the role of Chandler Bing, there was no one else for us,” the show’s creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, and an executive producer, Kevin Bright, said in a statement on Sunday.There was a sense of shock among fans, who had seen the cast together as recently as 2021 when they got together for a much anticipated reunion special. To those who have watched and rewatched the 10 seasons, often streaming them in the background of daily life, the actors have become reliable companions.“You know when you get that kind of sinking feeling?” said Olivia Freer, 28, a tourist from England who had bought tickets to the museum with her friends after learning the news. “I feel heartbroken. You don’t know them so you don’t think it’ll affect you, but it does.”The broad and enduring loyalty to the show has fueled enough demand for “Friends” pop-up shrines not just in New York, where the show is set, but in Miami and Salt Lake City, as well as around the world in Melbourne, Dublin and Amsterdam. Like many so-called immersive experiences, the event revolves around getting photos in the show’s trademark settings, including the orange couch at Central Perk and the blue cabinetry of Monica’s kitchen.Fans can recline in a La-Z-Boy chair like the ones Chandler and his pal Joey were known to sit in, and pose as though trying to finagle a sofa up a staircase, as Chandler did with Rachel and Ross in Season 5. Glass cases display props and costumes from the series, including Chandler and Monica’s wedding invitation and vows, as well as the outfit Chandler wore in a Thanksgiving episode in Season 8 in which Brad Pitt guest starred.So what is it about this show that turns props into precious memorabilia and faraway actors into what start to feel like cherished companions?For Amy Taylor, who was traveling with Stein, it’s the sense of comfort and ease that episodes of “Friends” give her — it was a balm for her during the pandemic in particular, she said. And it’s the common language it provides her and her loved ones. (In a reference to a running joke in the series, Taylor has a chick tattooed on her leg, and her cousin has a duck tattoo.)“I just hope he knew,” Taylor said of Perry, “that his character brought so much comfort to people.” More

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      Matthew Perry Made It Look Easy

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      Even as he struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, the “Friends” star Matthew Perry, who died at the age of 54, made it all look easy.A confession: When I received a news alert that the actor Matthew Perry had died, my mind adopted the particular cadence that Perry perfected as Chandler Bing, the character he played for 10 seasons on the NBC sitcom “Friends.” Here is what I thought, “Could this be any sadder?”Perry, 54, died nearly a year after the publication of “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” an unusually candid memoir of addiction and recovery. As he detailed in that book, he spent many of the best years of his career oblivious, avoidant, numb — conditions that don’t typically encourage great acting. But he was great. And it had seemed reasonable, if rose-colored, to hope that sobriety might make him better, returning him to the nervy, instinctive brilliance of his peak years. That hope is now foreclosed.A professional actor since his teens, Perry had appeared in more than a dozen sitcoms before landing “Friends” in 1994. I first remember seeing him years earlier, on an episode of “Growing Pains” screened by my school during a special assembly meant to advertise the dangers of drunken driving. Mostly it advertised Perry and his anxious, reckless charm.To say that he never did anything quite as good as “Friends,” before or after, is not to diminish his achievement. Even among the irrepressible talents of his co-stars, Perry stood out, for a rubbery, heedless way with physical comedy and a split-second timing that most stopwatches would envy. If you have seen more than a few episodes of the show — and many, many millions have, including fans born years after its initial airing — you will have absorbed Chandler’s rhythms, his catchphrases, the way Perry’s handsome, moony face would stretch like spandex, the better to sell a reaction. He had both an absolute commitment to what a line required and a way of gently ironizing that line. His character was the butt of jokes. Perry was in on those same jokes. There was a boyishness to him that seemed to excuse his characters’ worst behavior, on “Friends” and in subsequent roles.Those roles never served him as well and the shows he attached himself to rarely survived to a second season. His co-stars found other movies and series to showcase their talents. Perry’s latter projects, despite fine work on “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and “The Good Wife,” were largely grim, forgettable. It can be hard for boys to grow up.The cast of “Friends.” From left, David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc.Via Getty Images Warner Bros. Television/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIt seems to have been hard for Perry. “I wanted to be famous so badly,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “You want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant. I didn’t think what the repercussions would be.” Those repercussions included the enabling of his addictions and the loss of any anonymity. (It had the occasional upside, too. In his memoir, he wrote that after a reaction to an anesthetic stopped his heart, a worker in the hospital in Switzerland performed CPR for five full minutes to restore rhythm. “If I hadn’t been on ‘Friends,’ would he have stopped at three minutes?” he wondered, darkly.)His struggles were an open secret, then they weren’t even a secret. (He was speaking openly, if optimistically, as early as 2002.) And it’s a miracle, really, that he could perform as he did, in and out of rehab, even as various cast members confronted him about his alcohol use. He seems to have fictionalized some aspects of this in “The End of Longing,” a play he wrote and starred in. While the Times critic was cool on the drama, he wrote that Perry was “genuinely scary as a jalopy of a man running on ethanol.”Speaking to The Times last year, Perry treated his hard-won sobriety as serious and tenuous. “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better,” he said. “Every day.” Onscreen he could disguise that struggle. This was the genius of “Friends” and the genius of Perry, to make it all look easy. “Friends” was always a fantasy, a whitewashed vision of urban life, in which the characters had apartments with the approximate footprint of palazzos and infinite leisure time. (What was Chandler’s job anyway? Why did he so rarely go there?) But to watch it, as I did late Saturday night, for hours, was to relax into the confidence of its comedy, of Perry’s excitable charm. Onscreen, in that fountain, in some horrible, short-sleeved cardigan, he is there for us, still. More

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      Matthew Perry Is Mourned by Friends and Colleagues

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      Fans and celebrities paid tribute to Perry, who died at age 54 on Saturday.Celebrities, actors and entertainment and political leaders shared tributes to Matthew Perry, who starred on the hit television series “Friends” and died on Saturday at the age of 54.His death was confirmed by Capt. Scot Williams of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide division. Although there was no immediate cause of death, there was no indication of foul play.On social media on Sunday, Perry’s fans and colleagues celebrated the actor, who played the sardonic Chandler Bing on more than 200 episodes of the NBC sitcom “Friends,” which followed a group of young professionals living in Manhattan.On the show, Perry starred with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow.Fans and colleagues remembered Perry for his acting talent and kindness.The show’s Facebook page said: “He was a true gift to us all. Our heart goes out to his family, loved ones, and all of his fans.”NBC, which aired “Friends” from 1994 to 2004, said on Facebook that Perry “brought so much joy to hundreds of millions of people around the world with his pitch perfect comedic timing and wry wit.”The network added, “His legacy will live on through countless generations.”“Saturday Night Live” featured a black-and-white tribute card of Perry at the end of this weekend’s broadcast. He hosted the show in 1997.Morgan Fairchild, who played Chandler Bing’s mother on “Friends,” wrote on social media that she was “heartbroken about the untimely death of my ‘son’, Matthew Perry.”“The loss of such a brilliant young actor is a shock,” she said.Cast members of “Friends.” From left to right: David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller, Perry as Chandler Bing, Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay and Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani.Warner Bros. Television, via Getty ImagesMaggie Wheeler, who portrayed Chandler’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Janice and who had a memorable laugh on “Friends,” posted a photo of herself with Perry on Instagram.“What a loss,” she wrote. “The world will miss you.” Wheeler added: “The joy you brought to so many in your too short lifetime will live on.”Perry, who grew up in Ottawa, was also mourned by Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who was a childhood friend.“Matthew Perry’s passing is shocking and saddening,” Trudeau said. “I’ll never forget the schoolyard games we used to play, and I know people around the world are never going to forget the joy he brought them.”The Ottawa Senators hockey organization also paid tribute to Perry, writing, “Saddened to learn about the passing of Matthew Perry, one of Ottawa’s proudest sons and 𝑡ℎ𝑒 biggest hockey fan.” The post included a clip of Perry attending a game.The actress Selma Blair, who appeared in an episode of “Friends,” posted a photo of herself with Perry on Instagram. She described him as “my oldest boy friend.”She added: “All of us loved Matthew Perry, and I did especially. Every day. I loved him unconditionally. And he me. And I’m broken. Broken hearted. Sweet dreams Matty. Sweet dreams.”In an Instagram story, the actress Rumer Willis recalled hanging around Perry and her father, Bruce Willis, when they worked on movies together, including the 2000 film “The Whole Nine Yards.”She said that Perry “was so kind and funny and sweet with my sisters and me and I think his physical Comedy and that movie still makes me laugh so much.”“I know he had many challenges in his life and brought a lot of joy to people with his comedy,” Willis continued, adding, “I hope he can rest peacefully.” More

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      The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir

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      BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani.In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth.I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match.As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.Most of this is covered in the prologue. At one point, he writes in a parenthetical, “Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.”The book is full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)Perry said he had a moment after he recorded his audiobook when he thought, “Oh my God, what a terrible life this person has had!” Then he realized, “Wait a minute, it’s me! I’m talking about me.”Quietly and then, as he relaxed, at a volume that allowed me to stop worrying about my recording device, Perry settled into the conversation about his substance abuse. It started with Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck wine when he was 14, then ballooned to include vodka by the quart, Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin. He drew the line at heroin, a choice he credits with saving his life.“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”Perry said he had been clean for 18 months, which means that he was newly drug- and alcohol-free when the “Friends” reunion aired in May 2021.“I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he estimated.Most addicts don’t have Perry’s resources. But they have what he called “the gift of anonymity,” while his bleakest moments have been photographed, chronicled and occasionally mocked. For the record, Perry isn’t a huge fan of secrecy as it pertains to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsors three members. He explained: “It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide. This is not a popular opinion, by the way.”Perry’s demeanor brightened when we talked about pickleball, his latest obsession. He built a court at the house he’s moving into in the Palisades. He plays with friends and hired pros. He said, “I thought it would be a good idea, to pump myself up, to play pickleball before this interview, but basically I’m about to fall asleep in your lap.”So what inspired him to write a book?After his extended stay in a Los Angeles hospital, Perry started tapping out his life story on the Notes app on his phone. When he hit 110 pages, he showed them to his manager, who told him to keep going. He worked at his dining room table for about two hours a day, no more: “It was hard to face all this stuff.”Perry has written for television (“The Odd Couple,” “Mr. Sunshine”) before but, “writing a book I had not really thought of before,” he said. “Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Over the course of the next hour, Perry returned to the idea of helping fellow addicts 15 times. The dedication at the front of the book reads: “For all of the sufferers out there. You know who you are.”He said: “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.”“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center,” Perry writes.Danny Feld/Warner Bros.The memoir came together without a ghostwriter, which is rare for household-name authors. Megan Lynch, the senior vice president and publisher at Flatiron, said of the proposal she read last year: “There was a real voice to it. It was clear that he was going to share intimate details not just about his time on the show but about his entire life, and that felt revelatory. I’m not working on an assembly line of books by celebrities and it’s something as an editor I want to be very choosy about. For me, this really rose to a level that I do not ordinarily see.”Lynch, who watched “Friends” when she was 14 and credits it with providing a vision for a future life in New York City, added, “Unlike any celebrity that I think anyone has ever worked with, Matthew turned in his manuscript ahead of the deadline.”Although Perry hopes that “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will eventually be shelved in the self-help section of bookstores, “Friends” fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly of the 10 seasons he and his co-stars worked together, earning $1 million per episode at their peak.He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that the group knew he was drinking again. “‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he writes, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.” Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room.Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”In a phone interview, Kudrow said: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”She added: “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the ‘Friends’ theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”Perry’s childhood friends Christopher and Brian Murray echoed this sentiment. “He’s gone through more than any human being I know and he’s come out on the good side of it,” said Brian, the older of the two brothers who have known Perry since first grade. Riding bikes around their rural corner of Ottawa, the trio would belt out the theme song from “The Rockford Files” and rib one another in the cadence that Perry later immortalized on “Friends.”“A lot of it was tough to understand,” Christopher said. “You wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Fundamentally, his personality and his heart are absolutely in the same place they were when he was a kid.”“Alcohol really did save me for a while,” Perry said. “Then it didn’t. It’s like your best friend turns to you and goes, Now I’m going to kill you. And then you raise your hand and say, I need help here.”Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesFailed relationships were among the hardest things to write about, Perry said (“I’m lonely, but there’s a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe”), though he hopes to marry and have children in the future. “I think I’d be a great father,” he said.Eighteen years after “Friends” aired its last episode, Perry is tickled by its staying power, and its popularity among the children of its original viewers. “There are 15-year-old people wandering around, seeing me and wondering why I look so old,” he said.When I mentioned I’d seen a young woman in my hotel gym wearing a “Friends” sweatshirt — you rarely see merch from, say, “E.R.,” which capped off NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the ’90s — he laughed. “You should set me up with that girl,” he said. “Just say, I know this guy, he’s as single as they come.”Perry’s candid, darkly funny book now earns him an honorary folding chair — and shelf space — beside David Carr, Caroline Knapp, Leslie Jamison, Nic Sheff, Sarah Hepola and other authors who have explored the minute-to-minute, tooth-and-nail skirmish of recovery.“There is a hell,” Perry writes. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.”He said, “Now I feel better because it’s out. It’s out on a piece of paper. The ‘why’ I’m still alive is definitely in the area of helping people.” More

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      James Michael Tyler, Who Played Gunther on ‘Friends,’ Dies at 59

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      A real barista who was cast as a Central Perk co-worker of his crush, Jennifer Aniston’s character, he appeared in 150 episodes of the hit show.James Michael Tyler, who played the deadpan, smitten barista Gunther on the TV show “Friends,” died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59.His manager, Toni Benson, said the cause was prostate cancer, which was diagnosed in September 2018. After his diagnosis, Mr. Tyler shared his story to encourage others to get screened for prostate cancer as early as 40.“Friends” helped launch the careers of its star-studded cast, which included Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer. It debuted on NBC in the fall of 1994, ran for a decade, and typically had around 25 million to 30 million viewers each week.Though Mr. Tyler was not a main character, he was widely considered to be “the seventh friend” and appeared in 150 episodes. He played the part of Gunther, a barista at Central Perk, the friends’ hangout, who had a deep crush on Ms. Aniston’s character, Rachel, who also worked at the coffee shop.Mr. Tyler’s path to the show was fortuitous. While working as an actual barista at a real-life coffee shop, he was asked if he would be interested in being an extra on “Friends.” For the first season, his character was known as “Coffee Guy.”“At the time I was also working as a barista for a place called the Bourgeois Pig, one of the last independent coffee houses in Los Angeles,” Mr. Tyler told The New York Times in 2012. In his second season, he got a line of dialogue: “Yeah,” he said, when Mr. Schwimmer’s character, Ross, asked him if his apartment had stairs.Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the show’s co-creators, recalled the beginnings of Mr. Tyler’s run on the series. “When he started as an extra on Friends, his unique spirit caught our eye and we knew we had to make him a character,” they said in a statement Sunday night. “He made Gunther’s unrequited love incredibly relatable.”In the series finale, Gunther, known for his bleached locks, finally summoned the courage to confess his love to Rachel, who let him down warmly.“I love you, too,” Rachel told Gunther. “Probably not in the same way. But I do. And when I’m in a cafe having coffee, or I see a man with hair brighter than the sun, I’ll think of you.”Born May 28, 1962, in Winona, Miss., Mr. Tyler was the youngest of five children, raised by a retired Air Force captain and a homemaker, according to a biography on IMDb. He moved to Anderson, S.C., to live with his sister at age 11 and enrolled at Clemson University as a geology major. He earned a master’s of fine arts from the University of Georgia and moved to Los Angeles after a brief stint of selling cars in Olympia, Wash., according to the bio.“Michael loved live music, cheering on his Clemson Tigers, and would often find himself in fun and unplanned adventures,” Ms. Benson said in a statement. “If you met him once you made a friend for life.”Mr. Tyler revealed publicly in June that he had prostate cancer. He told “Today” that he was surrounded by an “extraordinary” support group and that many people were praying for his health.“It’s made me, personally, just realize how important every moment is, every day,” Mr. Tyler said. “And fighting. Don’t give up. Keep fighting. Keep yourself as light as possible. And have goals. Set goals. My goal this past year was to see my 59th birthday. I did that, May 28th. My goal now is to help save at least one life by coming out with this news.”While undergoing treatment, Mr. Tyler continued to perform and starred in two short films, “The Gesture and the Word” and “Processing,” earning accolades at film festivals, according to The Hollywood Reporter.Mr. Tyler’s survivors include his wife, Jennifer Carno. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. More

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      A Brief History of ‘Friends’ Reunions

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      Ahead of Thursday’s “Friends” special on HBO Max, here are highlights from the many times the cast members demonstrated that they were clearly not on a break.The long-awaited “Friends” reunion is almost upon us, set to land Thursday on HBO Max at around 3 a.m. Eastern. More