Matthew Perry Dead at 54

Corinne Heller
·3 min read
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Originally appeared on E! Online

The acting world has lost a TV comedy legend.

Matthew Perry has died in an apparent a rep and law enforcement source confirmed to NBC News. He was 54.

The source shared that the incident, which occurred at the Friends star's Los Angeles home "treated as a water rescue" but noted that no foul play is suspected.

An LAPD spokesperson told E! News that officers responded to a "death investigation for a male in his fifties" that afternoon.

Authorities found the Friends alum unresponsive in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home, law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles Times. Six days before his death, Perry shared a photo of himself sitting in a hot tub on Instagram. It was his final post.

The actor was born in Massachusetts in 1969 and raised in Canada. However, at age 15, he moved from Ottawa to Los Angeles to finish high school and pursue an acting career.

After taking on a few small parts on TV for several years, he landed his first major roles on the sitcom Boys Will Be Boys and Growing Pains before his breakout role of Chandler Bing on Friends in 1994.

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The NBC sitcom, which he starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer, ran for 10 seasons with Perry earning his first Emmy nomination in 2002. He went on to receive three more individual nods over the years—two for a guest role on The West Wing and one for his performance in the TNT movie The Ron Clark Story.

Following his run on Friends, Perry starred on TV comedies Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Go On and a remake of The Odd Couple, as well as the movies The Whole Nine Yards and its sequel The Whole Ten Yards.

Matthew Perry
Matthew Eisman/Getty Images

Throughout his life, the actor battled alcohol and drug addiction. He detailed his struggles in his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, released November 2022.

Perry recalled undergoing a near-death experience in 2018. He said that while saying in a sober living home, his colon "exploded" from years of opioid overuse and that he ended up spending two weeks in a coma and five months in a hospital. He underwent more than a dozen surgeries.

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"There is a reason I'm still here," he said in his book. "And figuring out why is the task that has been put in front of me. And it will be revealed. There is no rush, no desperation. Just the fact that I am here, and I care about people, is the answer. Now when I wake up, I wake up curious, wondering what the world has in store for me, and I for it. And that's enough to go on."

An instant best seller after its release, Perry reflected on how it resonated with fans. "People have just loved it," the actor later told E! News in November 2022 during the GQ Men of the Year event. "I shied away from nothing and I told the truth and the biggest thing was, the goal was, to help people and I know of a lot of people already who have been helped by it."

(E! News and NBC News are part of the NBCUniversal family.)

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