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Three years after his death, the story of how Matthew Perry won the part that defined him still reads like a sitcom plot. It has a doomed pilot, a friend’s bad career call, and a prayer.
In 1994, Matthew Perry was desperate for work. He later recalled that his terrible manager had told him he had no money, so he took a job on a pilot called LAX 2194, a show about airport baggage handlers in the distant future. That meant, as he put it, he was off the market just as a script called Friends Like Us began going around.
He read it and was floored. As per Gulf News, he told Seth Meyers in 2015 that it was “hilarious and great.” But the show’s creators had a rule against casting actors in what the industry calls “second position.” That’s when someone already working on one pilot gets cast in another, on the assumption the first will be canceled. They didn’t want to take that gamble.
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Why Craig Bierko Turned Down Friends & Saved Perry’s Life
Meanwhile, finding a Chandler was proving harder than anyone expected. Former NBC president Warren Littlefield said, “We thought Chandler was going to be a quick, easy role to cast,” and it wasn’t. Co-creator Marta Kauffman said the closest candidate was Craig Bierko. Bierko was a good friend of Perry’s, and Perry had even coached him for the part.
According to Perry’s memoir, he and Hank Azaria both pushed Bierko to take it. They agreed Friends was the better offer, but Bierko picked a show called Best Friends, where he would be the lead. Perry was stunned. Years later, he gave Bierko’s choice a lot of credit, writing that it “saved my life.”
Then luck stepped in. A Fox executive watched LAX 2194 and called it “the worst thing we’ve ever seen in our lives.” The network let Perry go, and the executive pointed the Friends team his way. The timing was oddly fitting. Three weeks before his audition, alone in his apartment, Perry had prayed, “Just please make me famous.”
The Friends Audition That Made Matthew Perry A Star
Perry walked into the audition better prepared than almost anyone. He had run through the script with friends so many times that he knew it nearly by heart. He also broke an unwritten rule by reading for Kauffman without holding the script, which was a bold move for someone who had been told to wait his turn.
It worked. Perry was the last member of the six-person cast to be chosen. Friends went on to run for ten seasons, and he earned his first Emmy nomination for the role in 2002. The sarcastic, insecure Chandler became one of the most recognizable comic characters in TV history.
Perry never wanted the part to be the whole story. He said he hoped that, after he died, helping other people would be mentioned before Friends. On this anniversary, the casting tale is a reminder of how close the show came to having a different Chandler. It also shows that one of television’s best-loved performances came out of rejection, luck, and a role that seemed meant for him.
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