George Clooney remembers Matthew Perry as a 'funny, funny, funny kid' who 'wasn't happy'

The former "ER" star shot to fame alongside "Friends" star Matthew Perry when their NBC shows became instant hits.

When NBC premiered ER and Friends nearly 30 years ago in the fall of 1994, it launched both George Clooney and Matthew Perry into superstardom. Now Clooney, 62, is remembering his Must See TV colleague, who passed away on October 28 at the age of 54.

"We were side by side on the soundstage," recalled the director and Oscar-winning actor in a new interview with Deadline. "We were all really close. We were at the upfronts in 1994 in New York." Clooney, who said he first met Perry when the up-and-coming actor was just 16, remembered the future Friends star as a "funny, funny, funny kid" — but one who never found peace in the face of success.

"All he would say to us, I mean me, Richard Kind and Grant Heslov, was, 'I just want to get on a sitcom, man. I just want to get on a regular sitcom and I would be the happiest man on earth,'" Clooney continued. "And he got on probably one of the best ever. He wasn’t happy. It didn’t bring him joy or happiness or peace. And watching that go on on the lot — we were at Warner Brothers, we were there right next to each other — it was hard to watch because we didn’t know what was going through him. We just knew that he wasn’t happy and I had no idea he was doing what, 12 Vicodin a day and all the stuff he talked about... It also just tells you that success and money and all those things, it doesn’t just automatically bring you happiness. You have to be happy with yourself and your life."

Though Clooney and Perry both experienced sudden, massive fame at the same time, the Ticket to Paradise star says he "had a good example of what not to buy into" after watching the career ups and downs of his famous aunt, Rosemary Clooney. "My aunt was the biggest singer in the business in 1950," he said. "And then rock and roll came in... And she was done. For 20 years she did a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking... She ended up having an incredible career later as a wonderful jazz singer, but she had to come to terms with all that stuff."

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