Even as a die-hard Friends fan, I can’t really recommend the much-hyped Friends reunion that hit the service then known as HBO Max in 2021. Because the show’s stars and creators refused to do a full-on scripted reboot—even as a one-time deal—the 104-minute special is mostly a rehash of behind-the-scenes anecdotes we’ve heard before, spiced up with a few high-concept interludes.
The reunion does, however, have one moment I’ve thought about a lot in the past two years. It comes when Matthew Perry—who played Chandler Bing, the biggest wiseass in a gang of wiseasses—reveals the crippling anxiety he felt even after the show became an enormous, era-defining hit. When he stepped in front of Friends’ live studio audience, Perry tells his five costars, “I felt like I was gonna die if they didn’t laugh. And 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…. I felt like that every single night.”
The special cuts away after Perry’s admission, moving onto happier topics. I wish instead it had taken a beat to really grapple with what Perry said, especially since it’s the only time Friends: The Reunion even obliquely acknowledges Perry’s perilous mental health, let alone his alcoholism and drug addiction. In retrospect, they hang over Friends like a fog.
Perry died on Saturday at the age of 54. We don’t yet know why; according to reports he was discovered unresponsive in a hot tub, and no illicit drugs were found at the scene. What we do know is that he was such a good actor—a man who could land a punch line even while concealed inside a wooden box, who could wring hysterics out of something as silly as the way he growled the name “Jill Goodacre”—that it was possible to watch 236 episodes of Friends without perceiving quite how tortured he was behind the scenes.
Especially in the show’s early seasons, Chandler could be a basket case—“hopeless and awkward and desperate for love,” as he put it in one memorable scene. But at his peak, Perry never appeared to break a sweat. More so even than his talented costars, he made comedy seem effortless, natural. It’s possible to imagine another actor successfully inhabiting clean-freak Monica or good-hearted dim bulb Joey; Chandler, though, is inextricable from the man who played him.
Yet there are entire seasons of Friends, Perry once said, that he couldn’t remember filming. The best-selling memoir he released in 2022 is called Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, a roughly 260-page expansion of his reunion revelation that lays out just how hard and how long Perry struggled. He said his disease led him to 15 rehab stays, 65 detox sessions, 14 surgeries on his opioid-ravaged body. “I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he told The New York Times last year. While making TV’s most popular show, Perry was the proverbial duck, appearing to glide gracefully as his legs pumped beneath the surface. It would be years before the rest of us realized just how frantically they were moving.
As elder millennials are wont to do, I’ve watched Friends in its entirety multiple times—in TBS reruns, on Netflix, on the DVDs I scored at a 2014 Central Perk pop-up. I started watching the show live on NBC when I was too young to understand Monica’s affection for the number seven or why Ross briefly had a monkey. (To be fair, David Schwimmer never got that, either.) The year she graduated high school, my sister, Anni, and I held our collective breath through the show’s series finale, exhaling only when Rachel got off the plane to Paris.
I loved Friends, but Anni loved Friends. She could hold an entire conversation speaking only in Phoebe Buffay quotes. She put a Joey and Chandler-inspired BarcaLounger in her college dorm room one year, and was devastated when space constraints forced her to sell it—but not so devastated she didn’t want to make a profit. “It’s called capitalism,” she later told me over AIM. “Which for the record I don’t believe in.”
Like Chandler, my sister had a way with one-liners. Like Matthew Perry, she was brilliant at hiding her drug dependency, until she wasn’t.
I’ve read and watched innumerable books and films and TV shows about the opioid crisis in the 15 years since her fatal overdose, as if by studying hard enough, I can make sense of an unfathomable loss. From Dopesick to Demon Copperhead, I’ve found these stories tend to follow the same pattern: A character gets injured either on the job or while playing sports, then is bamboozled by predatory marketing and big pharma reps into taking painkillers they don’t need. Before long, they’re hooked.
I suspect this narrative persists for two reasons: because those tactics really did ensnare countless people into opioid addiction before regulatory bodies caught on, and because self-evidently tragic victimhood is easy for an audience to digest. But though Perry says he started taking Vicodin after a jet ski accident, his memoir also speaks a different truth. In Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, he takes sole responsibility for his problems; he speaks candidly about the deep-seated insecurity that led him to take his first drink at 14, his insatiable hunger for fame and recognition, the relationships he ruined from adolescence on by being selfish and cruel. (Some of that behavior can be attributed to his drug use, but not all of it.)
