Matthew Perry, who starred as Chandler Bing on ‘Friends,’ is dead at 54

Ray Richmond
·6 min read
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Matthew Perry, who rose to major fame playing Chandler Bing on the smash hit NBC comedy “Friends” from 1994 to 2004, is dead. He was 54,

The actor was found unresponsive Saturday at around 4 p.m. in the hot tub at his Los Angeles home. First responding paramedics were unable to revive him. It’s unclear if his death was caused by drowning or cardiac arrest, but there were evidently no drugs found at the scene nor evidence of foul play. Perry had a long and storied history of substance abuse.

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Born in Williamstown, Massachusetts on August 19, 1969, Perry was raised in Ottawa, Canada. His mother, Suzanne Morrison, was a journalist and press secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. (His stepfather is “Dateline’s” Keith Morrison.) Perry moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to pursue an acting career. He made his television debut in 1979 on an episode of “240-Robert” and in the 1980s had guest spots on shows including “Not Necessarily the News,” “Charles in Charge,” “Silver Spoons,” “Just the Ten of Us” and “Highway to Heaven.” Regular roles on the series “Boys Will Be Boys,” “Growing Pains” and “Sydney” followed.

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More guest spots followed on shows like “Who’s the Boss?”, “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Dream On” and “Caroline in the City.” Perry’s big break came when he was cast as the wisecracking commitment-phobe Chandler on “Friends” as part of a tight-knit and mega-talented group of performers that included Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer. He earned an Emmy nomination in 2002 on a show that went on for 10 highly-rated seasons and was television’s hottest comedy throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. The sextet ultimately earned $1 million per episode apiece in 2002.

Despite all of his success – or perhaps because of it – Perry was beset by alcohol and pill addiction issues as “Friends” was making him enormously famous and fabulously wealthy. He sought treatment multiple times, including in 1997 and 2001. He spoke about it in detail (along with his rise to fame) last year in his New York Times Bestselling memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” It was released nearly a year to the day before his death: November 1, 2022.

The book detailed the shocking toll that substance abuse had taken on Perry. After taking his first drink at 14, by 18 he was drinking alcohol daily. After Season Two of “Friends,” he traveled to Las Vegas to film “When Fools Rush In.” There, he had a jet ski accident that led to him being prescribed Vicodin, which was the start of his addiction to pills.

At one point, as Perry revealed in his book, he was taking 55 Vicodin pills a day, and concocted various ploys in order to get them. He’d fake migraines or other pain, and sit through MRIs with different doctors. On Sundays, he’d go to open houses and search the medicine cabinets of different homes for any pills he could find. In 2018, his colon exploded and he was in a coma for two weeks, while his family was told he had a 2% chance to live. He was put on an ECMO machine, along with four others in the hospital; the other four didn’t survive. He then lived with a colostomy bag for nine months.

Through the years, Perry wrote that he’d attended 6,000 AA meetings, went to rehab 15 times, been in detox 65 times, had been on life support and spent between $7 million and $9 million struggling to get sober. He’d had 14 surgeries — his last in January 2022, which left him with a six-inch incision and metal staples. During COVID, he was at a rehab center in Switzerland and faked pain to get 1,800 milligrams of OxyContin a day and was having daily ketamine infusions. He then had to endure surgery while there and was given a shot of propofol. He woke up 11 hours later in a different hospital and was told that the propofol had stopped his heart for five minutes. The long CPR process also broke eight of his ribs and the doctor refused to give him more meds.

Perry told Diane Sawyer in an ABC interview in 2022 after his memoir was published, “Your disease is outside doing one-armed push-ups just waiting and waiting, waiting to get you alone, because alone you lose to the disease. And now I finally feel OK and I feel like I’ve got some strength. I’ve developed some safety nets around this.”

However, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that all of his abuse had sufficiently weakened Perry’s heart so that it might give out in spite of his relative youth.

After “Friends” left the air in 2004, Perry continued to work steadily. He went on to star in Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” for a single season (2006-07). In 2011, he created, executive produced, wrote and starred in he short-lived comedy “Mr. Sunshine.” He also had a recurring role on “The Good Wife,” starred for three seasons on the CBS reboot of “The Odd Couple” from 2015-17, and portrayed Ted Kennedy in the limited series “The Kennedys: After Camelot.” The “Friends” cast also reunited for an HBO Max special in 2021.

But there was the feeling that Perry could never quite find his footing in the nearly two decades after “Friends” went off the air. And perhaps a big part of that surrounded the devastating drug and alcohol issues that apparently dogged him nearly to the end.

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