Julia Roberts mourns 'heartbreaking' loss of ex Matthew Perry

The actress made an iconic guest appearance on "Friends" as a former classmate of Chandler Bing.

Julia Roberts has Friends on her mind. In a new interview with Entertainment Tonight, Roberts reflected on Perry's recent death at age 54.

"The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking," Roberts said. "I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can."

Roberts, of course, was on Friends once. She made a high-profile guest appearance in the season 2 episode, "The One After the Super Bowl," in which she portrayed a former classmate of Matthew Perry's Chandler Bing. Perry and Roberts were also in a real-life relationship at that time.

In Perry's 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, he revealed that Roberts only agreed to do the show "if I adequately explained quantum physics to her." So Perry hit the books, and the two started flirting over faxes. Perry was helped in his efforts by the Friends writers.

"She was giving him these questionnaires like, 'Why should I go out with you?' And everyone in the writers room helped him explain to her why," former staff writer Alexa Junge recalled in The Hollywood Reporter's 2021 oral history of the Friends Super Bowl episode. "He could do pretty well without us, but there was no question we were on Team Matthew and trying to make it happen for him."

Their efforts were successful. By the time the episode filmed, Perry and Roberts were dating. The episode itself was a hilarious humiliation for his character, as Roberts' Susie Moss got her revenge on Chandler for a long-ago prank by stranding him naked in a restaurant bathroom.

"They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of a one-off character and it was a really fun time," Roberts told ET about her appearance on Friends.

Alas, the real-life relationship only lasted for a few months. In his memoir, Perry revealed that it was his own lack of self-esteem that torpedoed the affair.

“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me,” Perry wrote. “I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”

Roberts' newest movie, Leave the World Behind, is set to hit Netflix on Dec. 8, and is sprinkled with references to the iconic '90s TV sitcom.

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.