Actor Matthew Perry spread so much joy. But joy was an emotion he himself was barely able to feel. At least that’s how he described himself. On Saturday, he was found dead in his own home in Los Angeles. Perry’s name will always be associated with “Friends”, or “Friends for life”, which ran on TV from 1994 to 2004. The situation comedy is loved by constantly new generations, which is actually a bit strange. The classic situation comedy is almost dead as a genre, and much of the humor in “Friends” feels very typical of its time. But there was something about the charming group of six friends, trying to find their footing in New York, that makes almost everyone want to be one of them, hang out with them on the sofa, exchange jokes and confidences with them. And funniest of all was Matthew Perry. In the role of the neurotic and sarcastic Chandler Bing, he was in a way the center of the series. It was he who, perhaps to the greatest extent, put into words the quick, smart, restless, pop-culturally accepted attitude to life. It was this attitude to life that permeated “Friends” and made teenagers and twenty-somethings curl up on the couch every Tuesday night and dream of living in a big corner apartment in the big city. Perry herself felt a strong kinship with Chandler Bing. In his autobiography, he told how he read the script for “Friends” and immediately realized that it would be a success. And that he himself was made to be Chandler. He himself had been the class clown and the group of friends. He seamlessly weaved the jargon between him and his friends into “Friends”. Co-star Lisa Kudrow recalls how it was Perry who kept the other five laughing the night they filmed the show’s famous vignette, and had to spend hour after hour, drenched and shaking. But Perry failed to take care of his own talent, or himself. Heavy abuse of alcohol and pills would characterize his entire life. At the age of 49, he acknowledged that he must have spent more than half his life in some rehabilitation center. Perry was born on August 19, 1969. He was the only child of the short-lived marriage of John Bennett Perry, an actor, model and singer, and Suzanne Longford, a former beauty queen who would become press spokeswoman for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. They separated when Matthew was nine months old, and he described his childhood as a kind of perpetual search for more attention from his glamorous but distant parents. A flight when he was five years old, sent alone from his hometown of Ottawa to visit his father in Los Angeles, he recalled as traumatic. He was alone and terrified, and thought death was coming with every turbulent bump. This feeling, of loneliness, of fear, of premonitions that those he loves will disappear, is repeated in his autobiography “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing”. There he describes how he started drinking at the age of fourteen, and for the first time in his life relaxed. At one point, he knelt on the kitchen floor and prayed to God to become famous, convinced that fame would blow away his problems. Just weeks later, he was offered the role of Chandler. But Perry was prone to addiction, and after a skiing accident in 1997 he became hooked on painkillers. He was intoxicated through large parts of the “Friends” recording. Even in such a reduced state, Perry managed to create a figure that so many felt they knew and loved. He emerged as a figure who destroyed much for himself but continued to delight others. Even when he talked about his darkest moments, he somehow couldn’t stop playing and joking with the language and the situations. He rarely singled out anyone other than himself. After “Friends”, the general public could mostly see Perry in guest roles in other, popular series such as “The West Wing” and “The Good Wife”. He left behind more than anyone can expect from such a troubled man. He should have had many more places where he could have used his own obvious, heartbreaking talent.
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Matthew Perry is dead – Statement
