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Matthew Perry may have played the funniest guy on TV, but something deeper was unraveling behind Chandler Bing’s sarcasm and sweater vests. Even longtime pal George Clooney, who knew Perry before Friends launched him into sitcom royalty, picked up on it. Perry got it all, yet none of it brought him the peace he had hoped for.
Clooney’s candid reflections after Perry’s death peeled back the glittery TV curtain to reveal a painful truth about chasing dreams in Hollywood. Perry wanted laughs, not legend but happiness. That was the one thing that kept slipping away.
Matthew Perry was found deceased in his residence in October 2023. Postmortem reports cited acute ketamine toxicity as the leading cause. Drowning and coronary artery disease were contributing facets. However, according to George Clooney, the late star’s inner turmoil didn’t start on that last day. It had been quietly there long before FRIENDS made him a household name.
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im completely devastated by this news i can hardly believe it. matthew perry made chandler bing come to life. he made millions of people laugh even in dark times. matthew you're so loved and you'll be so missed 💕 pic.twitter.com/LpTmFemuY1
— all things friends (@friendscatalog) October 29, 2023
Clooney, who knew Perry back when both were hustling around the Warner Bros. lot in the early ’90s, opened up about Perry’s silent battle. At the time, George Clooney was starring on ER, and Matthew Perry was still waiting for that one big break. “I just want to get on a sitcom, man,” Perry told him. It wasn’t about Emmy statues or being the face of pop culture. He just wanted to make people laugh. And he did. Oh, he really did.
FRIENDS exploded in 1994, and suddenly, Perry was one-sixth of the most prominent friend group on the planet. But while fans laughed along, Clooney noticed something that didn’t quite add up. “He wasn’t happy,” he recalled in an interview via Deadline. Perry had gotten the sitcom dream he always wanted. Yet the joy he imagined would never really land.
“We just knew that he wasn’t happy, and I had no idea he was doing what… all that heartbreaking stuff,” Clooney admitted, referring to Perry’s battle with addiction. And that was the crux of it, no one fully knew. Perry later revealed in his memoir that at the peak of FRIENDS, he was consuming up to 12 Vicodin a day. The audience saw Chandler as hilarious, but behind the scenes, Matthew Perry barely held himself together.
Mathew Perry’s drug addiction started with opioids the same way it did for millions of Americans: following an accident In 1997, he was prescribed painkillers and became addicted to them. He explains at one point, his addiction got so bad that he was taking 55 pills per day while… pic.twitter.com/bpR1DbH1k2
— M Waqas Khan Bhatti (@Iamwaqaskhan71) October 29, 2023
His death was tragic, but Perry had already begun turning that pain into purpose before the end. In Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, he didn’t write to protect an image. He wrote to help others feel less alone. Clooney’s words ring loud: “Success and money and all those things, it doesn’t just automatically bring you happiness.” Perry’s life and honesty proved that. He got what he wished for, but the peace he needed never came wrapped with fame.
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