Matthew Perry watched from rehab as ex-girlfriend Julia Roberts won her Oscar: 'I'll take you back'
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One of the lowest moments in Matthew Perry's life coincided with his very famous fling's crowning achievement.
In his new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing (out Nov. 1), Perry recalls being in rehab and watching his ex-girlfriend Julia Roberts win the Best Actress Oscar for Erin Brockovich.
The only thing he could do was make a joke: "I'll take you back," he said to the TV screen.
Mike Windle/Getty; Terry McGinnis/WireImage Matthew Perry; Julia Roberts
While detoxing in Marina del Rey in California, Perry remembers seeing Roberts' name called at the 2001 Academy Awards and her kissing her then-boyfriend Benjamin Bratt before walking to the stage to accept her award.
"As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry, pleading, filled with longing and tears, arguing with the universe while God calmly tapped his cane on the hard, cold world," Perry writes. "I made a joke. 'I'll take you back,' I said. 'I'll take you back.' The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now. And I was lucky to have them. They were saving my life."
Perry notes that he was "incredibly happy" for Roberts but also "grateful" for himself that he had made it to another day. "When you are at the bottom, the days are long," he writes. "I didn't need an Oscar, I just needed one more day."
Perry and Roberts had started dating before that with the help of a quantum physics paper. The movie star would agree to do a guest spot on Friends only if she could be in a Chandler storyline and if Perry wrote her a thorough explanation of quantum physics. Perry wrote it, the two struck up a friendship via fax, and they eventually started dating.
Perry, however, let his insecurities get the best of him and broke up with the Pretty Woman two months into their romance.
"Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me," Perry writes. "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, unloveable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can't begin to describe the look of confusion on her face."
Perry's new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, is out Nov. 1.
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