Matthew Perry held his relationship with the cast of Friends in the highest regard.
The actor, who was discovered passed away on Saturday at the age of 54, was most known for his role as Chandler Bing on Friends, which ran for a total of ten seasons between the years 1994 and 2004. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer were his co-stars in the successful comedy. He also starred with them.
In May of 2021, the cast members came back together for an episode of Friends: The Reunion that was shown on HBO Max and for an exclusive cover story in PEOPLE magazine.
“It altered the course of my life in every possible manner. When I was a guy of 24 years old, I was offered the show; by the time it finished, I was 34 years old. It shaped the course of my life. And I had the best time of my life doing that,” Perry said in an interview with PEOPLE at the time.
Perry became upset when speaking about the unbreakable friendship he has with his co-stars on Friends during the reunion special.
“The best way that I can explain it is as if after the performance was finished, if one of us bumped into each other at a party or any type of social event, that was it. That was the only time we saw each other. That marked the conclusion of the evening. You just sat the whole night through with the other person, and that was all.”
After that, he said, “You apologized to the people you were with, but they had to understand that you had met somebody special to you, and you were going to talk to that person for the rest of the night.” And it was the strategy that was successful.”
Perry said, “It’s certainly the way it worked with all of us,” as Aniston nodded her head in agreement and Cox started sobbing. Simply said, this is how things are.
Ben Winston, who assisted Tyler Perry in the direction of the reunion special, said at the time to The Hollywood Reporter that he “loved” working with Perry.
“He’s a brilliantly funny man and I thought he had some great one-liners in the show,” according to Winston. “I felt just happy and lucky to be in his presence and directing him on something like this.”
In November 2022, Perry’s autobiography titled Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was released, and Kudrow contributed to the book by writing the preface. He was candid about the challenges he had overcoming his addiction, which included those he faced while appearing on the program.
In an interview with PEOPLE that took place in October of 2022, he said that his fellow cast members had been quite supportive of him during their time on the program.
“They were understanding, and they were patient,” Perry said of the audience at the time. “It’s the same as with penguins. In the wild, when one of the birds becomes ill or severely damaged, the others will gather around it, walk around it, and support it up until it is well enough to walk on its own again. And I feel like that’s sort of how the cast made me feel.”