This is slightly odd news. Slightly odd for me, because I am a generation behind Perry and to me he was always “an adult”. But I know it will be very odd for those of you who are the same generation and think of him as an equal and old friend.
Matthew Perry is one of the few stars in the West who come close to the way people feel about Indian stars. Not that he is so famous or powerful or even universally beloved, but the way his performance persona is so familiar, so long lasting, that it feels like we truly know him just because we’ve seen his “character” grow up onscreen.
Friends is, of course, a unique sitcom in the history of Television. It was a record breaking hit in America, and more importantly it became a record breaking hit globally, probably America’s most well-known pop-culture export. What is more unusual is that it showed the characters actually growing and changing. Sitcoms are “situational comedies”, they rely on set situations that never change. But Friends wasn’t afraid of change, it let the characters grow up organically as the seasons went on. Which is kind of the central concept of the series, it’s about young people for whom “friends” are their family because they are in the awkward space between leaving home and creating their own new home and family.
Matthew Perry is the surprising fulcrum character for this change, the one who changes the most over the course of the series. In the first season, he was effortlessly funny, far more so than the rest of the cast. He got all the best lines, and even made his bad lines into good lines. And that made his few “serious” episodes all the more powerful because we saw the contrast with his comic sarcasm. And as the series went on and the writers wrote to his strengths, it lead to one of the greatest organic love stories in television. Friends was supposed to be about the will-they won’t-they romance between Ross and Rachel. But somehow in the background, the most serious actress on the cast and the biggest comic ended up vibing together and creating a relationship that just made sense.
Friends has a lot of flaws. It’s dated in its comedy, which is hard to avoid with sitcoms. The later seasons had some serious character miss-steps. The writers and actors had to keep stringing out and avoiding growth in order to keep the situation stable, which meant the characters were limited in their growth. The Ross and Rachel romance went on ridiculously long, past the point where they would either logically have gotten together, or realized they would never get together and ended up with other people. The Phoebe and Joey characters became Peter Pans, frozen in time. But Chandler and Monica, Matthew Perry and Courtney Cox’s characters, were allowed to grow up and they grew beautifully. After years of moments of caring friendship and trust, they slept together. And then with a lot of conversations and communication, they decided to try a relationship. Through out the second half of the show as their relationship progressed, there were constant episodes about how relationships take work, communication, and love, they don’t just “happen”. This is something long running shows are sooooooooo afraid of. Will they-won’t they is exciting, farcical misunderstandings are exciting, but how do you make two people fighting and then talking it out “funny”? And somehow Matthew Perry and Courney Cox made that work. We watched them fight through relationship steps, decide to move in together, decide to get married, get married, and then fight through infertility struggles. It’s not funny, it’s also not necessarily dramatic (no near death experiences or airport chases), but we loved these characters so much and knew them so well, that it felt funny and dramatic to us.
I think there was something magical about what Matthew Perry was set into as Chandler Bing which could not be recreated in his later work. He’s the “class clown”, naturally. That’s what every message from friends and co-workers is confirming, he could make you laugh all night. But he’s not necessarily the guy you go to for comfort, for deep thoughts, for close emotional connections. Putting him into the skin of this character for so many years, and then putting him up against a scene partner (Courtney Cox) who would challenge him to dig deep and reveal emotions, brought out something masterful from Matthew Perry.
This is what makes me think of Indian film. He was so young, he hit it big so quickly, he got locked into a very particular persona. For most actors in the West, that spells artistic death. But in Indian film, that is expected, that is the first step. The second step is what you DO with that persona, how you play with it and expand it. That’s what Matthew Perry-Chandler Bing did. He took a persona that fit his own personality and over ten years stretched it until it became a full person, not just a persona.
I wish Matthew Perry had been allowed to grow as much as Chandler Bing. Tragically, he fell into addiction. I’m noticing so far there are a stunning number of unexpected tributes from friends, talking about how he made them laugh. But what about real emotional intimates? He never married, or even had a relationship (at least publicly) that lasted more than a couple years. He worked obsessively, while his fellow Friends cast members moved on to jobs they found interesting with long breaks in between, Perry went from show to show. I guess this is what Chandler Bing would have been if he was an alcoholic. If he used comedy to distract people and draw them to him, and then alcohol to dull his loneliness. “Chandler Bing”, the character, fell into a friends group that was like family, that knew him and loved him and challenged him. But Matthew Perry was too far gone by the time he started making adult friends to be able to build that. According to his own account, by the time he was 16 he was already drinking every day.
Matthew Perry, the person, has a tragic but familiar story. An addict by the time he was a teenager, spent his adulthood in black outs and near death experiences, unable to fully develop relationships or grow as a person. And then, finally, he reached sobriety and was just starting to build something real for himself when his previous abuses caught up to him and his heart gave out.
The blessing is, Matthew Perry also gave us Chandler Bing, gave us a fictional version of himself who developed healthy habits, close bonds, overcame his inner demons and learned to love himself. Unlike all the many other sad stories of addicts in the world, for those who loved Matthew, there is a way to remember him as he could have been, not as he was.
