George Clooney tells us about his friendship with actor Matthew Perry during the Friends years: “It was tough to watch him abuse substances.”
According to George Clooney, Matthew Perry, the actor who played Chandler Bing in Friends, wasn’t happy with the success that the ’90s cult series brought him.
In a rare interview about their decade-long friendship, Clooney, 62, spoke about Perry’s struggle with alcohol and drug addiction while the duo acted in their respective NBC shows.
“I knew Matt when he was 16,” Clooney told Deadline. “We played paddle together. And he was a fantastic and really, really funny guy.”
“When I met him, he was still a kid, and all he would tell me was, ‘I just want to get on a sitcom. That would make me the happiest man on earth.’“
“And he was probably one of the best sitcom actors ever. But unfortunately,” George Clooney added, “it didn’t bring him the joy or peace he wanted. He wasn’t happy.”
Since the TV shows of the two actors, ER and Friends, were filmed on the same NBC stage, Clooney and Matthew Perry often saw each other. In 1995, Clooney even appeared in an episode of Friends.
“We were at Warner Brothers, working there side by side – but his suffering was hard to watch because we didn’t know what was happening to him,” the actor said, referring to Matthew Perry’s struggle with substance abuse, which the actor had talked about extensively throughout his life.
“We only knew he wasn’t happy for him. And that also tells you that success, money, and all the other things you get when you become famous don’t automatically bring you happiness,” he added. “You have to find happiness within yourself and your life.”
George Clooney: “Matthew Perry wasn’t happy with success”
Matthew Perry was found dead in the bathtub of his apartment at the end of October.
A recent autopsy determined that the Friends actor died from the acute effects of ketamine.
The autopsy stated that Perry was “clean for 19 months” before his death, although he was undergoing doctor-approved therapy with ketamine infusion and had received his last treatment “a week and a half before” his death.
However, the medical examiner noted that “the ketamine present in his system at the time of death could not come from that infusion therapy, as it was significantly higher in quantity.”
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