A new three-part Netflix documentary, The One About Matthew Perry, made with his family's blessing, reveals how the Friends star was a “prisoner of addiction” who never felt his life was truly complete. The series, premiering globally on Netflix on October 27, explores the highs and lows of Perry's life, from his global fame as Chandler Bing to his decades-long battle with drink and drugs, which ended with his death in October 2023 aged 54.
Early Life and Family
Perry's parents split when he was very young. He lived in Canada with his mother Suzanne but would sometimes fly alone as a child, from the age of just five, from Montreal to Los Angeles to visit his father, John Bennett Perry, who was also an actor.
His sister, Mia Perry Bowick, says: “He was absolutely obsessed with Batman from a very young age. I think actually resonated on a deeper level in terms of the backstory piece of it, of having a troubled childhood and coming out of that to become this hero and using wealth for good.
“He would talk about that feeling of kind of a sense of emptiness or loneliness that he couldn't quite fill. It's impossible to know like where these kind of thoughts come from. But when he was younger, I know that it was hard for him to find a space that he felt really secure in.
“As a kid, Matthew's mom lived in Canada, and his dad lived in California. So there was like a lot of going back and forth once Matthew was old enough to do that. I can sense how destabilising it could feel, and how that would add to maybe this sense of ‘where do I fit in all of this?’”
Rise to Fame and Struggles
At 15, Perry moved to Los Angeles to live with his father. The film recalls an interview where he spoke of a rare time he took to praying after spending his late teens and early 20s trying to make it. Perry explains: “I said to god, you can do anything you want to me just make me famous. About three weeks later I got Friends, but god did not forget the other part.”
Warren Littlefield, President of NBC Entertainment through the Nineties, remembers Perry nailing his audition as Chandler. "All of the casting was fairly easy except for the role of Chandler. They couldn't find a Chandler, And then Matthew Perry came into the room. I couldn't get enough. I wanted more. It took less than 30 seconds to feel ‘Oh yeah, this is it. This is this is Chandler’.”
Jeff Strauss, a writer and producer on Friends' first season, helped shape the character of Chandler for Perry. He says: “Matthew's relationship to that character was pretty strong, for for all kinds of good reasons, there was this overwhelming pool of visible vulnerability in both Matthew and the character, filling silences with jokes and struggling in his relationships with women.”
The success of Friends, which launched in 1994, was near-instant for the cast. Within a couple of seasons it had made global stars of Matthew, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow. For the first three seasons he seemed to be managing his drinking issues, which began in his teens, but when he went away to make his debut film Fools Rush In, a freak jet ski accident saw him prescribed strong painkillers, and he soon became addicted to them.
Decades of Addiction and Recovery Attempts
Perry needed to head into rehab in 1997 before the fourth season of Friends, marking the beginning of more than two decades of recurring problems. Sister Mia, who he bought a sports car for her 15th birthday, recalls: “His like year anniversary for getting sober was always right around at my birthday, and he never quite could make it a year.”
The documentary highlights that at points in his life he would attend up to three AA meetings a day, but at some point he would disappear from friends and family and they would fear the worse.
Looking back, Mia says: “The overall the trajectory of his addiction, it was getting worse, and that's kind of what we know about that disease that it does get worse the longer it goes along, and so whether it was how much money he was spending on rehab or the amount of pills he was taking every day, to what the consequences were of him using were escalating and escalating.
“You know, he spent about $7 million over his lifetime trying to get sober, and that number is is staggering. It just paints a picture to me of overall how seriously he took his disease and how desperate he was to be sober.”
Director Jonathan Lynn, who worked with Perry on The Whole Nine Yards in 2000, speaks highly of his supportive role on the film, tweaking scenes and being a brilliant comic presence. But even on that film there were dark days if the star became stressed or had drunk too much the night before. Lynn saw Perry perform in London's West End show in 2015: “I felt I was looking at the wreckage of what could have been an extraordinarily successful career and a very happy man, but. But you know, he was a he was a prisoner of his addiction.”
Near-Death Experience and Final Days
In the final episode of the documentary series, Perry's sister Mia recalls when he ruptured his colon from opioid use and had just a 2% chance of surviving. She says: “There's so much grief family members and friends have to sit with when their loved ones are struggling with substance abuse, and there are many, many layers and aspects to grief, and one of them is denial. And I would fall into that denial place often.
“We'd had a lot of near misses. There's been overdoses. There's been car accidents. There's been all sorts of stuff.
“But this was the only time that there were a lot of people going ‘we have no idea if he's coming out of this thing’.”
Against all odds, Perry came out of the coma, and after three months he was able to leave hospital, but he was weak and needed round the clock care and could barely walk. His sister says it felt like he had “aged 20 years in three months”.
It took years for him to get over it, and even when the Friends reunion happened in 2021 he was not fully healed and was visibly uncomfortable to be back in front of the cameras. Mia says: “I mean, after it aired, I think he felt he felt relieved, and after he filmed it, I know he felt really tired. Like he was kind of at this place of, how am I gonna keep going? I know he was really scared. I know he was really fighting for his life. I know that a lot of parts of him did not think it was possible for him to live a sober life.
“I don't think I gave up hope, but I started, unfortunately, kind of thinking of his disease as a terminal illness.”
There was some positive news that the 2018 near-death experience had acted as a wake up call and was him hitting rock bottom. Perry wrote a book about his experiences in 2022 and was delighted when it became a bestseller. He took an active part in family life and re-connected with several ex-girlfriends and became friends again, whilst also hoping to find long term love which had always eluded him.
Best friend Roger Castillo recalls: “He would move on quickly and then regret moving on. I remember one time he said something to me, which really resonated. Because I was complaining something about my kids, and he was like, ‘Roger, I would give everything I have to have what you have’.” Former girlfriend and close friend Rome Shadanloo adds: “Intimacy was his greatest wish and biggest fear.”
Perry also found some help clinically by using ketamine and was upbeat and filled with energy. His sister was “skeptical” but admits on the surface he was the “best he had ever been”. Rome, a close friend at this point, explains: “He shared that he felt like he had a spiritual experience in the ketamine. That he had seen the man multiple lives. That he felt like he saw God in the ketamine. I think that's what was drawing him towards it.”
But problems were never too far away, and Perry was tragically given the opportunity to buy extra ketamine and up his dosage, which would lead to his death. He was found dead in his backyard hot tub in Los Angeles in October 2023. Police found a criminal network responsible for distributing large quantities of ketamine to Perry and other addicts at exorbitant rates.
Amongst those involved was Perry's assistant Kenny Iwamasa, who had worked with him for decades and was his live-in assistant. He had injected him with ketamine before his death. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison, and the Perry family still understandably feel “betrayed” by him.
At the funeral, the remainder of the cast of Friends all attended and held hands and walked up as one to view Perry's open casket. Sister Mia says she feels his presence, the first time being on her shoulder making a joke at the funeral that made her laugh at an inappropriate moment.
Their dad John is now old and too frail to take part in the documentary, but Mia says: “I think my dad was extremely proud of how hard Matthew worked to get well, and backed him up 100% in anything he wanted to do to get well, and we were all so grateful for Matthew for for doing that, for never giving up, for always trying.”
She adds: “I still find a lot of solace in the fact that he was he was happy. He said he was happy. He felt at peace. The last Instagram post he put up was the picture of him in the hot tub, looking out over the ocean, saying that he was in his favourite place in the world, and that's exactly where he died a few weeks later.”
