Matthew Perry’s sister said the famous episode of “Friends,” in which his character Chandler marries Monica, was extremely bittersweet for his family because they didn’t know if they would ever get to see him walk down the aisle in real life.
The actor – who struggled on and off with addiction throughout his life – never married or had children before tragically dying in 2023 at the age of 54 from the acute effects of ketamine.
“When we saw this marriage, we all knew that he had wanted this in life; he wanted a partner and he wanted children,” his sister Mia Perry Bowick told People in an interview published Wednesday.
She added: “We all knew how serious his disorder was, so there was this feeling of, ‘Who knows what’s going to happen?’ »
Monica (Courteney Cox) and Chandler (Perry) got married during the season 7 finale of the hit series, which aired in 2001.
Perry revealed in his 2022 book, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” that he was immediately “taken back to the treatment center…in a van driven by a sober technician” after the wedding scene ended.
He also wrote about his struggles while filming and how viewers could see where he was in the throes of his addiction based on his weight.
“When I’m fat, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s a lot of pills,” he wrote, adding that by the end of the third season, he was trying to get 55 Vicodin a day — otherwise he would get “so sick.”
Perry had a long and colorful dating history, including dating Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts in the ’90s.
He then dated “Mean Girls” star Lizzy Caplan from 2006 to 2012.
In November 2020, the “Fools Rush In” actor revealed that he proposed to his then-girlfriend, literary executive Molly Hurwitz, but the couple split six months later.
At the time, Perry said in a statement through her rep, “Sometimes things just don’t work out, and this is one of them. I wish Molly the best.”
In his book, he writes that he was “high as a kite” when he proposed to Hurwitz after learning of his engagement later.
“I didn’t remember – needless to say we broke up,” he wrote.
Perry’s sister opens up about Perry’s death for the first time in the upcoming Netflix documentary, “The One About Matthew Perry,” which premieres Oct. 27 on Netflix.
Presented as the third anniversary of Perry’s death approaches, the three-episode series includes comments from Bowick, as well as many of Perry’s longtime friends.
Perry died in his hot tub on October 28, 2023, at his California home. In addition to the effects of ketamine, drowning, coronary heart disease and the effects of buprenorphine (an opioid) were also included in the official autopsy report.
In August 2024, five arrests were made as part of the investigation into the circumstances of his death. Perry’s longtime assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, 61, and four others — including “ketamine queen” Jasveen Sangha — were accused of “taking advantage” of Perry and his escalating drug addiction, leading to his fatal overdose.
Sangha was sentenced to 15 years in prison for her role in her death, while Iwamasa was sentenced to three years and five months in prison.
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