Friends Forever: Jennifer Aniston's Touching Tribute To Matthew Perry
In the last days of October 2023, beloved Friends actor Matthew Perry was found dead in his hot tub. He had only been 54 years old, and despite his considerable comedic talents he’d lived a hard life: everyone knew he had terrible struggles with addiction. But that didn’t stop the people to whom he was closest — including his Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston — from loving him. And after his passing, Aniston wrote a heartfelt and emotive tribute to the man who brought Chandler Bing to life.
Tribute
Aniston made her post in November 2023 once she had taken time to fully process the loss. It was an extremely heartfelt tribute to a man she’d loved like a brother.
“Oh boy, this one has cut deep... Having to say goodbye to our Matty has been an insane wave of emotions that I’ve never experienced before,” was how her moving message began.
Sitting in the grief
She continued, “We all experience loss at some point in our lives. Loss of life or loss of love. Being able to really SIT in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep.”
“And we loved him deeply. He was such a part of our DNA. We were always the six of us. This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be.”
Laughter
Then Aniston talked a bit about Perry’s personality. “For Matty, he KNEW he loved to make people laugh. As he said himself, if he didn't hear the ‘laugh’ he thought he was going to die. His life literally depended on it. And boy did he succeed in doing just that. He made all of us laugh.”
“And laugh hard. In the last couple weeks, I’ve been poring over our texts to one another. Laughing and crying then laughing again. I’ll keep them forever and ever. I found one text that he sent me out of nowhere one day. It says it all.”
Text messages
The text message exchange was on a separate slide. There was a message from Perry with a picture of him and Aniston laughing together, and the message read, “Making you laugh just made my day. It made my day.”
Aniston’s response was “Awww the first of THOUSANDS of times…” along with a starry-eyed emoji and a crying-with-laughter emoji. It was a very heartfelt glimpse into what a loving relationship they’d had.
Love
Aniston finished her poignant statement with, “Matty, I love you so much and I know you are now completely at peace and out of any pain. I talk to you every day… sometimes I can almost hear you saying ‘could you BE any crazier?’”
“Rest little brother. You always made my day…” she concluded, and at the end she added a heart emoji and a white dove emoji. All in all, it was a heartrending display of grief.
Condolences
Many people posted comments of support in response to Aniston’s post. One read, “So very sorry for your loss. Was gutted by the news. Can only imagine what it’s like for his loved ones. Sending love.”
Another said, “I know Matthew wanted to be remembered, not for Friends, but for helping people. The thing is, Friends did help people. It still helps people. It will help us always.”
Perry’s book
Aniston and Perry had always been very close. In fact, Perry started off his time on Friends by developing a big crush on her. He wrote about it in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
He wrote, "I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued, too – maybe it was going to be something.”
Friends
Perry eventually asked Aniston out, but she said no. Perry recollected that although Aniston had said straight away that she would love to be friends, he immediately ruined the moment by going, “We can’t be friends!”
He was wrong, of course. He and Aniston became such good friends that she was one of the people who helped him through his addictions whenever they reared their ugly head.
Confrontation
Perry wrote his memoir that Aniston had approached him with the simple words, “I know you’re drinking.” He was devastated and confused, but she pressed on, telling him, “We can smell it.”
By “we,” of course, she meant the entire rest of the Friends cast. Perry recalled how that one simple word had “hit me like a sledgehammer.” But all Perry’s co-stars had wanted to do was help him.
Penguins
While promoting the book, Perry told TV host Diane Sawyer that his co-stars “were understanding, and they were patient,” about his addiction troubles. The whole cast of the show — Aniston, Perry, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer — had always been close.
“It’s like penguins,” Perry explained. “In nature, when one is sick or very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up and walk around until that penguin can walk on its own. And that’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
In fact, all the other Friends stars made their own personal tributes to Perry after his passing, too. Cox, who’d played Perry’s onscreen wife Monica, posted a clip from Friends.
“I am so grateful for every moment I had with you Matty and I miss you every day,” she wrote. “When you work with someone as closely as I did with Matthew, there are thousands of moments I wish I could share. For now here’s one of my favorites.”
Funny and kind
She wrote, “To give a little backstory, Chandler and Monica were supposed to have a one-night fling in London. But because of the audience’s reaction, it became the beginning of their love story.”
“In this scene, before we started rolling, he whispered a funny line for me to say. He often did things like that. He was funny and he was kind.” Like Anston, Cox too posted a heart emoji and a dove.
Lisa Kudrow
Kudrow, who’d played Phoebe on the show, made an equally heartfelt Instagram tribute. She wrote about how she and Perry had bonded after shooting the pilot for Friends, then called Friends Like Us.
“Thank you for making me laugh so hard at something you said, that my muscles ached, and tears poured down my face EVERY DAY,” she wrote, before adding in many more thank yous.
Open heart
“Thank you for your open heart in a six-way relationship that required compromise. And a lot of ‘talking,’” Kudrow wrote. “Thank you for showing up at work when you weren’t well and then, being completely brilliant.”
She finished, “Thank you for the best ten years a person gets to have. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for all I learned about GRACE and LOVE through knowing you. Thank you for the time I got to have with you, Matthew.”
Matt LeBlanc
Matt LeBlanc played Perry’s onscreen best friend and roommate Joey; he was as devastated as all the others were and wrote a touching tribute. “It is with a heavy heart I say goodbye,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “The times we had together are honestly among the favorite times of my life.”
“It was an honor to share the stage with you and to call you my friend. I will always smile when I think of you and I’ll never forget you. Never. Spread your wings and fly brother you’re finally free. Much love. And I guess you’re keeping the 20 bucks you owe me.”
David Schwimmer
And the final main member of the cast, David Schwimmer, likewise posted a tribute on Instagram. His post was accompanied by an image of the two actors in character as Ross Geller and Chandler Bing.
“Matty, thank you for ten incredible years of laughter and creativity,” he wrote. “I will never forget your impeccable comic timing and delivery. You could take a straight line of dialog and bend it to your will, resulting in something so entirely original and unexpectedly funny it still astonishes.”
A family
Schwimmer went on, “And you had heart. Which you were generous with, and shared with us, so we could create a family out of six strangers. This photo is from one of my favorite moments with you.”
“Now it makes me smile and grieve at the same time. I imagine you up there, somewhere, in the same white suit, hands in your pockets, looking around — ‘Could there BE any more clouds?’”
Last conversation
Every member of the Friends cast felt the loss keenly. But because Aniston was the most famous out of all of them, it fell to her to speak out the most.
In December 2022 she talked to Variety about the last conversation she’d ever had with Perry, and how that had related to his sobriety. She was in tears as she spoke.
Happy
“He was happy. He was healthy. He had quit smoking. He was getting in shape. He was happy — that’s all I know,” she said, as her friend Reese Witherspoon held her hand.
“I was literally texting with him that morning, funny Matty. He was not in pain. He wasn’t struggling. He was happy. I want people to know he was really healthy, and getting healthy. He was on a pursuit. He worked so hard. He really was dealt a tough one. I miss him dearly.”
Tragedy
The tragic thing was, though, an autopsy proved that Perry’s death had been caused by the drug ketamine. Despite his many, many struggles to stay sober, he hadn’t managed it in the end, and it had killed him.
Perry had been undergoing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy sessions before he died. Yet it was determined that the ketamine in his system hadn’t been from those sessions. His official cause of death was ketamine, buprenorphine, drowning, and coronary artery disease.
Tears
There was no doubt that addiction had completely derailed Perry’s life before it tragically ended it, but Aniston had done her best to be there for him throughout it all.
“Nobody shed more tears for Matthew during the darkest points of his struggles with addiction than Jennifer,” a close friend of hers told the Daily Mail newspaper in November 2023.
Bitter blow
They went on, “There was speculation at the time of the 2021 Friends reunion that Matthew wouldn't be a part of it because his demons had gotten the better of him. But Jennifer absolutely wouldn’t have done it without him.”
“He put in the work and made it a success even though he seemed frail. But Jennifer genuinely thought his worst days were behind him. So his death just two years later has come as a bitter body-blow to her.”
Funeral
“It doesn't matter whether he died as a result of a freak accident or whether it was directly connected to his drug issues; this was a day that Jennifer has dreaded coming for 20 years,” the friend went on.
“She always wanted to help Matthew any way she could — that was a constant for her.” She was with her fellow Friends cast members at the funeral, but she was one of the first to arrive.
Slurred speech
For some fans, the Friends reunion was the first they’d heard of Perry in a while, and when the trailers first started coming out people instantly drew attention to Perry’s supposed “slurred speech” in them.
Yet plenty on social media leapt to his defense. “I wish people would leave Matthew Perry alone about his slurred speech already,” one wrote. “He has a sobriety coach so it's obviously a long-term health issue he is dealing with. Slurred speech doesn’t mean stoned or drunk out of one’s mind.”
Laughter
The Friends reunion had granted fans a small insight into Perry’s mindset, the one that led to his addictions. He was very open about it. “I felt like I was going to die if [the live audience] didn’t laugh,” he said on the show.
He went on, “It’s not healthy, for sure, but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh and I would sweat and just go into convulsions if I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get. I would freak out.”
Not understanding
Aniston had been present for this revelation and, despite knowing about Perry’s turmoil of addiction, she was shocked and saddened by it. She said as much to Today in a post-reunion interview.
“I didn't understand the level of anxiety and self torture [that] was put on Matthew Perry, if he didn’t get that laugh, and the devastation that he felt,” she said. “Which makes a lot of sense.”
Memoir
Perry wrote extensively about his drug addiction in his 2022 memoir. Again, he was very open indeed about it, freely detailing all the problematic and embarrassing aspects of life as an addict.
The book opened with words which are now still more troubling to digest. They read, “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.”
Highest point
In the book Perry detailed that behind the scenes of Friends, he was struggling desperately. During the much-loved episode where Chandler marries Monica, he was actually undergoing rehab, and it was hard for him.
“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,” he wrote.
Hail Mary
Perry also shared a terrifying story about how he had nearly died in 2018. His colon burst after opioid use, and he ended up in a coma for two weeks. Doctors told his family he had a 2 percent chance of making it out alive.
“I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that,” Perry wrote.
Some kind of reason
And yet, “There were five people put on an ECMO machine that night and the other four died and I survived. So the big question is why? Why was I the one? There has to be some kind of reason.”
And although tragically Perry didn’t live for much longer after that near-death experience, he used his remaining years of life in the most productive and helpful way that he could.
Seeker
Despite all the challenges he continued to face, Perry’s main goal was to help other people through addiction. He was completely devoted to this goal even as he struggled himself.
“I would like to be remembered as somebody who lived well, loved well, was a seeker,” Perry said on the Q With Tom Power podcast in 2022. “And his paramount thing is that he wants to help people. That’s what I want.”
Best thing
Perry went on, “The best thing about me, bar none, is that if somebody comes to me and says, ‘I can’t stop drinking, can you help me?’ I can say ‘yes’ and follow up and do it.”
“When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned. I want that to be the first thing that’s mentioned. And I’m gonna live the rest of my life proving that.”
Perry House
To that end, during his life Perry founded a whole sober-living facility dedicated to helping people get better from addiction. He had once of his residences in Malibu converted for the center, and it bore his name: the Perry House.
It was a facility for men, and it offered workshops and programs that gave them the tools to beat addiction. Perry created it with Earl Hightower, an addiction specialist.
Legacy
Hightower spoke to People magazine in 2013 about Perry and his goals. "Matthew is an ambassador of possibility for a vast group of people,” he said. “People he’ll never meet will get services because he championed their cause."
And although Perry died tragically early, he did indeed leave behind a great legacy of helping people. His advocacy, his facility, and his honest memoir have all played a part in that.
Touching lives
Some of the people whose lives had been touched by Perry spoke to The Independent after his passing. One of them was a 28-year-old Friends fan and addict who wished to remain anonymous.
“When you get admitted for an overdose, they overload you with pamphlets and information about percentages of relapse and they remind you so frequently that relapse is a part of recovery,” she said. “Hearing the story of someone who continually got up over and over again was very, very reassuring and very healing.”
Profound loss
Perry was also praised by the CEO of Phoenix House, a treatment center that had awarded Perry for his advocacy work. Alice Gleghorn called Perry’s death “a profound loss to the recovery community.”
“The stigma attached to drug addiction continues to be a key barrier to people who need help and treatment for substance use disorders,” she said to The Independent. “Matthew Perry’s struggles were public due to his career, but he showed incredible courage in openly sharing his recovery journey for the benefit of others.”
Hank Azaria
And another Hollywood star who’d graced episodes of Friends, Hank Azaria, made a video on Instagram detailing how Perry had helped him, too, through addiction. “The night I went into A.A., Matthew brought me in,” he said.
“The whole first year I was sober, we went to meetings together… I got to tell him this, as a sober person, he was so caring and giving and wise, and he totally helped me get sober.”
Foundation
Perry’s legacy is continuing on with a foundation set up in his name. The Matthew Perry Foundation said in a statement the week after Perry’s death that it planned to become “the realization of Matthew's enduring commitment to helping others struggling with the disease of addiction.”
Its statement went on, "In the spirit of Matthew Perry's enduring commitment to helping others struggling with the disease of addiction, we embark on a journey to honor his legacy by establishing the Matthew Perry Foundation, guided by his own words and experiences, and driven by his passion for making a difference in as many lives as possible."
“Celebrate him”
Perry’s untimely death has been unbelievably difficult for his loved ones, but hopefully they can take solace in the fact that he left behind a tremendous legacy of helping other people.
Aniston perhaps summed things up best in 2024 when she was asked at a red-carpet premiere, “How do you hope everyone continues to celebrate Matthew’s legacy?” She answered simply, “Celebrate him.”