Several years ago whilst faffing around on YouTube I found a clip of Matthew Perry on a late-night talk show. So that we’re clear from the start about my level of fandom, when I nonchalantly tell you that I ‘found’ the clip, as if I merely stumbled across it, what I actually mean is that I deliberately searched for Matthew Perry’s name on YouTube, watched several videos, probably at a time of night when I should have been going to bed, and this is one of the many clips that came up. He was telling an anecdote that has stayed with me ever since.
In the height of Friends’ success in the mid to late nineties, he and the cast had done a magazine shoot where there’d been a lot of models in bikinis. He returned home incredibly horny because of the aforementioned models, so decided to watch some porn. As soon as he was finished he immediately wanted to switch it off because, in his own words, ‘when you’re done, you’re done’. The TV wouldn’t turn off for some reason so he decided instead to turn the volume down to zero, but was surprised to find that he could still hear the film. It suddenly dawned on him that he hadn’t turned off his outdoor speakers after listening to some music on his patio the night before, so had been blasting a porn film to his neighbours in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.
The phrase ‘when I’m done, I’m done’ enters my head almost every time I watch porn, because I feel exactly the same way. I can enjoy what I’m watching up until the moment and then it suddenly seems ridiculous, horribly staged and embarrassing and I need it to stop. And then I think of Matthew Perry telling that story.
Friends has been woven into the fabric of my life for decades, sometimes in ways that result in me recounting crass stories about masturbation. But my first interaction with the show was much more innocent.
The first time I can remember seeing it I was lying on the dark carpeted floor of the living room of my childhood home watching the episodes where the friends are in London. I think my big sister must have requested we put it on. I remember a feeling of excitement, but looking back can’t work out what would have been particularly entertaining about it for a ten year old. I just somehow picked up the sense that this was a big deal. And it quickly became a big deal to me, too. From then on I would try to watch every episode as it aired on Channel 4, and began a tradition of spending my Christmas money on Friends videos (remember videos?).
The show planted an image in my head of what my grown up life would look like. I would live in a big city with my best friends, have takeaway pizza as often as I wanted and my fridge would be stocked with beer and Diet Coke. I began campaigning for a mini fridge in my room, a symbol of the grown up freedom I wanted to emulate. My parents sensibly declined.
I don’t know the point at which I became totally hooked, but by the time Friends was drawing to its conclusion in 2004, I was obsessed. There was a big Friends poster in my room, alongside many pictures of the show I’d printed off after extensive google image searches. I quoted it incessantly and looked forward eagerly to each new episode on a Friday night. A Friday night where, let’s be honest, a slightly more well adjusted teenager might have had better things to do than be sat at home glued to the television. I distinctly remember the night the final episode was airing, hearing voices walking past our house outside and thinking ‘What are these people doing? Why aren’t they inside watching the last ever episode of Friends?!’ I watched all the retrospectives, read all the articles, got a commemorative book about the show for my birthday, lapped up everything Friends-related I could get my hands on. I had to hide my excitement when my real life friends (yes, surprisingly I did have some) brought up the final episodes; my adolescent desire to appear less interested than I was overrode my eagerness to blabber on about the show, but only just.
Chandler was always my favourite. He was sensitive, funny and beautiful. He was a bit of a nerd and had a ‘quality’ that made some people assume he was gay. In other words, just my type. Ross and Rachel were fine but Chandler and Monica were the couple I rooted for and the type of relationship I yearned to find. Since Matthew Perry appeared to be quite similar to his character, my teenage affection spilled over into the actor as well and I sought out every other film, tv show or appearance he did. I can still recall off the top of my head that I’ve watched him in: Fools Rush In, Three To Tango, The Whole Nine Yards, The Whole Ten Yards, Serving Sara (which admittedly I couldn’t get through), Numb and the series Studio Sixty on The Sunset Strip. I’ve subsequently googled and reminded myself that I’ve also seen him in 17 Again and Almost Heroes. So, basically, everything he’s ever done.
It got to the point where I’d consumed so much stuff about Friends that I moved onto reading transcripts from episodes online, and from there it was an easy side step into the murky underworld of fan fiction. This was my dirty secret. I didn’t see myself as a fan fiction person, the girls at school who were into fan fiction were such geeks, surely I couldn’t be like them?! One used to use the computer room to read fan fiction of Casualty, a show I didn’t even enjoy enough to watch many of the real episodes of. According to the grapevine, another girl wrote her own Star Trek stories in which she was a member of the crew and our German teacher was her mother. She publicly gave printouts of her stories to the teacher in question, an act of such social suicide that as an adult I can’t help but admire her blistering commitment to being herself. What extraordinary courage it takes for a teenager to be weird out loud. I spoke so cruelly about those girls.
I wasn’t reading any old fan fiction either. Those who’ve read fan fiction before probably know where this is going, but I was reading ‘slash’, a specific sub genre in which characters of the same gender are doing it, often characters that have no romantic or sexual involvement with one another in the actual canon of the show. And I enjoyed Chandler/Joey. I didn’t want them to be together in the actual show. No, I just..enjoyed…reading and thinking about them in romantic and erotic scenarios with one another. Totally normal. And I would read this on our shared family computer. The peril of being discovered! I wasn’t doing anything whilst I read, but still. Around this time my parents developed a habit of bursting into the spare room ‘needing to get something’, a toe-curlingly embarrassing memory which in hindsight makes me feel like they definitely knew I was up to something in there.
A few months after the show ended, I moved from my small all-girls secondary school to a big sixth form college further away, where I had dreams of creating just the kind of fun and close-knit mixed gender friendship group that I had watched for years on TV. What actually transpired was one of the worst years of my life, in which I made no friends at my new college and became more and more lonely and isolated as the year went on.
At this point, my already obsessive love for Friends became a desperate clutching at something comforting. Repeats of the show would play on TV every morning at the exact time that I was getting ready to leave for college, and my insistence on watching as much of the episode as possible before my mum dropped me off at the train station caused huge tensions between mum and I. She knew the time we needed to leave to make sure I caught the first of my two trains, and I was constantly pushing it. I knew that too, but the level of dread I felt at another day of hideous loneliness was almost unbearable and the warm appeal of watching a show I’d already seen multiple times was hard to resist. My mum would despair over me jeopardising my success at school over a TV show, but it wasn’t just a TV show to me. It was a lifeline.
It wasn’t the last time that I leant too heavily into a fictional world when my real life was challenging. It’s been a crutch of mine throughout my life, one that I’ve learned to recognise over the years and try to gently steer myself away from. But this was the worst time. It probably appealed that several of the characters frequently talked about the bad times they had had in high school, and yet here they were, beautiful and happy and living it up in New York City. I could imagine an amazing life for myself without having to do the painful work of actually living it.
Things got immediately better when, after a miserable year of sixth-form college I gave up and went back to my old school to finish the last year of my education. I formed new friendships and deepened old ones, and slowly my grip on the comfort blanket of Friends loosened. I still loved it, but I didn’t need it as much any more. I spent Friday nights at the pub and even occasionally kissed some boys. I realised I wanted to go to drama school and pursue my passion. I started to get a glimpse of the life I had pined for.
Years went by and I achieved my dream of going to drama school. I graduated and moved to London, where my big city life was absolutely nothing like Friends. I did work as a waitress, but somehow didn’t have the wardrobe or lifestyle of Rachel Green. I realised that whilst Joey is portrayed as a not-particularly successful actor on the show, he’s actually wildly successful in comparison to most in the industry. I could only dream of being cast as Al Pacino’s butt.
I still kept up with Matthew Perry and his work from time to time, although I had slowly found more and more of it, and him, a bit..cringe. Part of it was most definitely a societal aversion to people who dare to age or gain weight. He’d dealt with addiction his entire life, he’d never been married but had said publicly many times that he’d like to be, he had a series of failed acting projects- by the cruel standards of fame, we are encouraged to see someone like Matthew Perry as tragic, or worse, embarrassing. When I found out in 2016 that he had written a play that would soon make its world debut in London, I was intrigued but cautious. I suspected it wasn’t going to be very good, so I held off buying a ticket to the play. Then a friend of mine offered me a free ticket, and of course I couldn’t turn it down.
It was awful. Badly written, badly acted, the kind of play where you can feel the shame of the other people on stage just trying to get through a job that they know they should feel lucky to have but really wish they didn’t have to do. In the middle of the play, Matthew’s definitely-not-autobiographical character, who was an alcoholic, started telling an anecdote. The anecdote. The “I accidentally played porn to my neighbours anecdote”. Hang on a second, I’ve heard this one before. It was such a peculiar feeling to be as physically close as I was ever going to get to this person I’d admired so much, but feel nothing but second hand embarrassment. Never watch your heroes in their self-written play.
Around a similar time many of us started to look back on Friends in a different light, seeing all the things about it that haven’t aged well, which I needn’t go into because we’ve all read the think-pieces. I was still incredibly fond of the show and the characters, but found certain jokes distasteful or just plain unfunny, to the extent that several years went by in which I didn’t watch a single episode- unheard of behaviour from the woman who spent her teens watching at least two episodes a day. With a few years’ hindsight, I’m a little less critical and am glad that shows from nearly 30 years ago don’t reflect modern viewpoints- society should have changed in that time, and so should I. I can enjoy the nostalgia of Friends without agreeing with every joke or storyline.
Friends had played little to no role in my life for years until 2022 when I heard that Matthew Perry was soon to release an autobiography. Despite being fairly sure it would be a car crash in one way or another, I was eager to read it, and lapped up reviews, quotes and excerpts around the book’s release, eventually listening to the audiobook version myself.
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was quite the experience. There were of course the absolute horror show stories surrounding how addiction had affected his life, the celebrity gossip tidbits and the truly sad passages about his mental health, but my prevailing takeaway from the book was that Matthew Perry seemed like, well, a bit of a dick. And not in ways that he knew – plenty of reviews and he himself mentioned how he hadn’t shied away from exposing how his behaviour as an addict over the years had caused harm to those around him, but this wasn’t the stuff that bothered me.
What bothered me was that the narrator, the Matthew of the present day writing the book, seemed not to realise that he didn’t respect women, repeatedly describing women he likes as ‘so smart’ as if this was a revelatory thing for a woman to be, barely mentioning a woman without referencing her looks and taking several paragraphs to tell us how snubbed he felt when an ex who’d since moved on quite understandably felt it wouldn’t be appropriate to come to his play or hang out with him. He described himself several times as one of the funniest men on the planet and talked about his extreme wealth a lot. He wrote about how David Schwimmer, as the breakout star of season 1 of Friends, could have earnt more than everyone else, but instead was instrumental in the cast’s famous joint negotiations for higher and equal salaries. Matthew noted how he’d like to think he’d have done the same thing in the same position. But later in the book there’s a section about how he essentially got his people to throw their weight around when negotiating his pay for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, arguing that it was, in fact, not an ensemble show and that he was the star who should be paid more. Hmm.
I did also feel his pain and sense that he was a flawed, fundamentally not-bad person doing his best, just like all us millions of other flawed, fundamentally not-bad people. But my Matthew Perry bubble had well and truly burst.
And then he died. Travelling alone in a disappointing beach town in Vietnam, I opened my phone to the headlines that Matthew Perry had been found dead at his home at the age of 54. I didn’t at first feel much at all – shocked of course, but in his own words ‘if I did die, it would shock people, but it wouldn’t surprise anybody’. I got on with things as normal, but over the hours and days that followed a melancholy would creep in here and there, reading his castmates post tributes to him on Instagram, seeing youthful happy photos of him alongside retrospectives of his life. I found myself pouring over updates and articles, reflecting on what his life and career had meant to me, and I picked up this very essay, abandoned many months earlier when I realised I didn’t really know what the conclusion was. (I still don’t).
Of course I have to admit that I’m not actually mourning Matthew Perry when I ‘mourn Matthew Perry’. How could I? I never met him, and any sense that I ‘knew’ him is ultimately pure fantasy. What I’m really mourning is the passage of time, the fragility of life, the versions of myself that loved him, that clung to Friends when I needed it, that found him embarrassing, that realised he was simply just a person. I hope that what I’ve written doesn’t come across like cruel shots at someone who’s recently died. I merely want to be honest, and frankly find it distasteful to sugar-coat a life purely by virtue of its having ended. People are complicated, as are our relationships to them, even if that relationship is entirely one-sided.
And so I’ll cry for him, and for the fact that I’ll never again be 10 years old, lying on the carpet of my childhood home. Someone else lives there now. And I watch different TV shows.
As she stumbles along 