It was so special it felt like we’d all been together in a previous life or something. Or in a future life, but certainly this one. This was a real day. But a day that dreams were made of.
For the longest time I didn’t really want to talk too much about Friends. Partly that was because I’d done plenty of other stuff, too, but all anyone ever wanted to talk about was Chandler—it’s like James Taylor talking about “Fire and Rain” (a gruesome little tale if you’ve ever heard what that’s about). It’s like a band who’ve written a brilliant new album but all anyone wants to hear when they play live is the hits. I always admired Kurt Cobain’s refusal to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or Led Zeppelin’s refusal to play “Stairway to Heaven.” The New York Times once said that “Friends … sticks to [Perry] like a sweaty shirt.” They weren’t right about that—in fact, that’s just fucking cruel—but they weren’t the only ones to think it. I was so good at something, yet I was being penalized for it. I left my blood, sweat, and tears onstage every Friday night—we all did. And that should be a good thing, not something that says we can only excel at that.
I’m not complaining. If you are going to be typecast, that’s the way to do it.
But in recent years, I’ve come to understand just what Friends means to people. And we knew from the very start that it was something very, very special.
I was the last actor to be cast in the entire pilot season of 1994—in fact, I got the gig on the actual final day of pilot season.
With L.A.X. 2194 thankfully in the rearview mirror, I was free to be Chandler Bing. The following Monday after the Friday I was hired was day one of my new life—this was big, and I guess we all felt that way, because we all showed up dead on time. Well, Matt LeBlanc was first, every single day; Aniston last, every single day. The cars got nicer, but the order stayed the same.
We sat around the table, and all met each other for the first time. That is, except me and Jennifer Aniston.
Jennifer and I had met through mutual acquaintances about three years earlier. I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued, too—maybe it was going to be something. Back then I got two jobs in one day—one was Haywire, an America’s Funniest Home Videos–type show, and the other was a sitcom. So I called Jennifer and I said, “You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to!”
Bad idea—I could feel ice forming through the phone. Looking back, it was clear that this made her think I liked her too much, or in the wrong kind of way … and I only compounded the error by then asking her out. She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, “We can’t be friends!”
Now, a few years later, ironically we were friends. Fortunately, even though I was still attracted to her and thought she was so great, that first day we were able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact that we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer.
Everyone else was brand-new to me.
Courteney Cox was wearing a yellow dress and was cripplingly beautiful. I had heard about Lisa Kudrow from a mutual friend, and she was just as gorgeous and hilarious and incredibly smart as my friend had said. Mattie LeBlanc was nice and a cool customer, and David Schwimmer had had his hair cut really short (he had been playing Pontius Pilate for his theater troupe in Chicago) over his hangdog face and was incredibly funny right away; warm and smart and creative. After me, he was the guy who pitched the most jokes—I probably pitched ten jokes a day and two of them got in. They weren’t just jokes for me; I’d pitch jokes for everybody. I’d go up to Lisa and say, “You know, it might be funny if you tried to say this…” and she’d try it.
The director, Jimmy Burrows, was the best in the business, too—he’d directed both Taxi and Cheers. He knew instinctually that Job One for us was to get to know each other and generate chemistry.
Immediately, there was electricity in the air.
I’d always wanted to be the only funny one. But now, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, I quickly realized that it’s better if everyone is funny. I could already tell that this was going to be big; I knew it from the start, but I didn’t say anything out loud. Partly that was because it isn’t unheard of for an actor to fuck up a table read so badly that they were politely asked to leave before a minute of shooting took place. But that would be tomorrow—for now, Jimmy took the six of us to Monica’s apartment set and told us just to talk to each other. And so we did—we talked and joked, about romance, our careers, our loves, our losses. And the bond that Jimmy knew would be critical had begun.
The six of us ate lunch together, outside on a beautiful spring day. As we ate, Courteney—the only established name of the group back then—said, “There are no stars here. This is an ensemble show. We’re all supposed to be friends.”
Given her status—she’d been on Family Ties and in Ace Ventura and in a guest spot on Seinfeld and had danced with Bruce Springsteen in the video for “Dancing in the Dark”—she could have been everything and everybody; she could easily have said “I’m the star.” Hell, she could have had her lunch somewhere else, and we would have to have been fine with it. Instead, she simply said, “Let’s really work and get to know each other.” She said it’s what she’d noticed about how it worked on Seinfeld, and she wanted it to be true about Friends, too.
So we did what she suggested. From that first morning we were inseparable. We ate every meal together, played poker.… At the start, I was full-on the joke man, cracking gags like a comedy machine whenever I could (probably to the annoyance of everyone), trying to get everybody to like me because of how funny I was.
Because, why else would anybody like me? It would take fifteen years for me to learn that I didn’t need to be a joke machine.
That first afternoon we were assigned dressing rooms, which eventually didn’t matter because we were never in them. We were always together. As we all walked to our cars and said goodbye that first evening, I remember thinking, I’m happy.
This was not an emotion I was altogether used to.
That night I called my friends (except for Craig Bierko, given what had happened) and told them what a wonderful day I’d had. I then spent yet another night “at college” (the Formosa), as was my custom. I remember saying that night that I was on a show that was so good it was better than anything I could have dreamed of writing myself.… My friends were all so happy for me, but even then, I could sense a shift.
Maybe I was growing out of this Formosa thing? I had a life-changing job that I had to—hell, desperately wanted to—report to in the morning, so I drank far less than usual. My apartment even had a Lifecycle in the back, and I used it every day, dropping about ten pounds of baby/alcohol fat between the pilot and the first episode.
That night I went to bed thinking, I can’t wait to get back there tomorrow. Next morning, as I drove from Sunset and Doheny over the Cahuenga Pass to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, I realized that I was leaning toward the windshield as I drove. I wanted to be there.
That would be true for the next decade.
Day two was big. We reported to a new building—Building 40—for our first table read. I was nervous and excited, and yet confident, too. I had always been good at table reads. But there was still the looming thought that anyone could be fired and replaced (Lisa Kudrow, for example, had originally been cast as Roz on Frasier but had been fired during the rehearsal process by none other than … Friends director, Jimmy Burrows). If jokes didn’t land, or something was off, well, anybody could be replaced before they’d even properly found their way to their dressing room.
But I knew Chandler. I could shake hands with Chandler. I was him.
(And I looked a hell of a lot like him, too.)
That day, the room was packed—in fact, it was standing room only. There were writers, executives, network people. There must have been a hundred people in the room, but I was a song-and-dance man, and this is where I excelled. We got reacquainted with Marta Kauffman, David Crane, and Kevin Bright—the people behind the show, and who had hired us—and almost instantly we all felt they were our parental figures.
Before the table read began, we all went around the room introducing ourselves and saying what we did for the show. Then it was time to read. How would it go? Would the chemistry we’d only just started to create show up, or were we just six young hopefuls making believe that this would be our big break?
We needn’t have worried—we were ready, the universe was ready. We were pros—the lines flew out of our mouths. No one made a mistake. All the jokes landed. We finished to thunderous applause.
Everyone could smell money.
The cast could smell fame.
After the read the six of us piled into a van and were brought to the actual set at stage 24 to begin rehearsing. But it was the run-through at the end of the day that sealed the deal—the jokes, the chemistry, the script, the direction, everything was magical. All the elements seemed to meld into one hilarious, cogent, powerful whole. And we all knew it.
This show was going to work, and it was going to change everyone’s lives forever. I swear there was a popping sound; if you listened really closely, you could hear it. It was the sound of people’s dreams coming true.
It was everything I thought I wanted. I was going to fill all the holes with Friends Like Us. Fuck Charlie Sheen. I was going to be so famous that all the pain I carried with me would melt like frost in sunlight; and any new threats would bounce off me as though this show was a force field I could cloak myself in.
There is an unwritten law in show business that to be funny, you had to either look funny, or be older. But here we were, six attractive people, all in their twenties, all knocking every joke out of the park.
That evening, I drove home on a cloud. There was no traffic; all the lights were green; a trip that should have taken half an hour took fifteen minutes. The attention that I always felt had eluded me was about to fill every corner of my life, like a room illuminated by a flash of lightning. People were going to like me now. I was going to be enough. I mattered. I wasn’t too needy. I was a star.
Nothing was going to stop us now. No one walking into a ballroom would have to turn around and notice me. All eyes would be on me now, not the pretty woman walking three feet in front of me.
We rehearsed the rest of the week, and it was then that we began to notice something else. I have been an actor since 1985 and that has never happened before or since, and it was beautiful: the bosses were not in the least tyrannical. In fact, it was a truly creative atmosphere. We could pitch jokes, and the best joke won, no matter where it came from. The craft services lady said something funny? Put it in, it didn’t matter. So, not only was I there as an actor, but my creative juices were flowing, too.
The creators took each of us out for lunch, too, to get to know us, so they could incorporate some aspects of our real personalities into the show. At my lunch I said two things: one, that even though I considered myself not unattractive, I had terrible luck with women and that my relationships tended toward the disastrous; and two, that I was not comfortable in any silence at all—I have to break any such moment with a joke. And this became a built-in excuse for Chandler Bing to be funny—perfect for a sitcom—and Chandler wasn’t much good with women, either (as he shouts at Janice as she leaves his apartment, “I’ve scared ya; I’ve said too much; I’m awkward and hopeless and desperate for love!”).
But think of a better character for a sitcom: someone who is uncomfortable in silence and has to break the silence with a joke.
This was all too true, both for Chandler, and for me. Fairly early in the making of Friends I realized that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston. Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. And then I’d ask myself, How long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?
But that shadow disappeared in the hot glow of the show. (That, and her deafening lack of interest.)
On tape nights, nobody made a mistake. We might have run scenes over if a joke didn’t land—all the writers would huddle together and rewrite—but mistakes? Just never happened. So many shows have blooper reels, but there are only a few for Friends. From the pilot on … in fact, that pilot was error-free. We were the New York Yankees: slick, professional, top of our game from the very start. We were ready.
And I was talking in a way that no one had talked in sitcoms before, hitting odd emphases, picking a word in a sentence you might not imagine was the beat, utilizing the Murray-Perry Cadence. I didn’t know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades—for now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance. (Marta Kauffman was later to say that the writers would underline the word not usually emphasized in a sentence just to see what I would do with it.)
Even when there were issues with the characters, we were able to work them out to the point where the solutions created their own iconic moments.
When I first read the script, I knew it was different because it was so character driven and smart. But early on, Matt LeBlanc was concerned that because he was this kinda cool, macho, ladies’ man in the script, Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe wouldn’t be friends with him, wouldn’t like him that much, and that made his character less believable.
It didn’t help that Matt was very good-looking—he had leading man looks, even to the point where I was a little jealous of that when I first saw him. But he was so nice and funny that any jealousy I had soon disappeared—but still, he hadn’t been able to find the right way into his character. He was the one character in the show that had not been properly defined—he was described as a cool, Pacino-type, out-of-work actor, so that’s how he was playing it, but it still wasn’t working. At one point during a wardrobe session, he put on brown leather pants, which were thankfully nixed by everyone, especially Marta, who was in charge.
Then came the moment early in the run where he has an exchange with Courteney about a woman he’s been seeing and how the sex wasn’t working out. Courteney asks him if he’s thought of being there for the girl, and Joey just simply doesn’t understand the concept. That was the moment he turned from being a ladies’ man to a loveable, useless, dumb puppy. He underlined this by doing a running joke of things being repeated to him and him not following them. He had found his position in the show, which was basically as a big dumb brother to Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe. Everyone was in place.
Occasionally Matt would come into my dressing room, mostly during season one, and ask me how to say his lines. And I would tell him, and he would go downstairs, and he would nail it … but he gets Most Improved Player because by season ten, I was going into his room and asking him how he would say certain of my lines.
This was all to come. For now, we were filming shows ahead of our fall 1994 air date. And as yet, no one knew who we were.
With the shows in the can, all that was left to find out was our time slot. NBC knew they had something special, so they put us right between Mad About You and Seinfeld. It was the perfect spot; plum. This was before streaming, so your time slot was crucial. It was still the days of appointment TV, when folks would rush home to catch the 8:00 P.M. show or the 9:00 P.M. show. And people organized their lives around their shows, not the other way round. So, 8:30 P.M. on a Thursday, between two huge shows, was a massive deal.
We flew to New York on the Warner Bros. jet for the “upfronts.” The upfronts are when a show is presented to the affiliates. It was on this trip that they told us the name of the show was now Friends (when they renamed it I thought it was a horrible idea—I never said I was a smart person), and Friends was a smash with the affiliates, too—everything was lining up. In New York we were celebrating, getting drunk, partying; then on to Chicago for more upfronts, more partying.
Then we had to wait a summer before the show first aired. I filled that summer with three notable things—gambling in Vegas at the behest of Jimmy Burrows; a trip to Mexico on my own; and a make-out session in a closet with Gwyneth Paltrow.
I was back in Williamstown, Massachusetts, when I met Gwyneth. She was doing a play there, and I was visiting my grandfather. At some big party we slipped off into a broom cupboard and made out. We were both still unknown enough that it didn’t make it to the tabloids, but with that in mind, it fell to Jimmy Burrows to give me a reality check.
After the upfronts it was clear the show was going to be a hit, so Jimmy flew us all to Vegas on the jet—we watched the pilot of Friends on the way—and once we arrived, he gave us each $100 and told us to go gamble it and have fun, because once the show aired in the fall, we’d never be able to do it again.
“Your lives are going to utterly change,” Jimmy said, “so do some things in public now because once you’re as famous as you’re about to be, you’ll never be able to do them again.” And that’s what we did; we six new friends got drunk and gambled and wandered through the casinos, just six close strangers on a weekend trip, unknown to anyone, no one asking for autographs or photos, none of us being chased by paparazzi, a million miles from what was coming, which was every single moment of our lives being documented in public for all to see forever.
I still wanted fame, but already I could taste a wild and weird flavor in the air—would fame, that elusive lover, really fill all the holes I carried around with me? What would it be like to not be able to put twenty on black in some harsh-lit casino, a vodka tonic in my hand, without someone shouting, “Matthew Perry just put twenty on black, everyone, come and see!” This was the last summer of my life when I could make out at a party with a beautiful young woman called Gwyneth and no one, save Gwyneth and I, cared.
Would the payoff be worth it? Would giving up a “normal” life be worth the price paid, of people digging through my trash, clicking pictures through telephoto lenses of me at my worst, or best, or everything in between?
Would I ever again be able to anonymously replicate my twenty-first birthday, when at the Sofitel across from the Beverly Center, I’d drunk seven 7 and 7s, poured a bottle of wine into a huge brandy snifter—you know, the one they put on the piano for tips—ordered a cab, gotten into the back of the cab with the snifter, still sipping the wine, tried to give directions to my home when I could only pronounce the letter L, only for the guy up front to yell, “What the fuck are you doing?” because he wasn’t a cabdriver—it was just some random car?
Most important, would these holes get filled? Would I want to trade places with David Pressman or Craig Bierko, or they with me? What would I tell them down the line when my name became a shorthand for stand-up comedians and late-night hosts, a shorthand that meant “addict”? What would I tell them when complete strangers hated me, loved me, and everything in between?
What would I tell them?
And what would I tell God when he reminded me of my prayer, the one I’d whispered three weeks before I got Friends.
God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.
He was about to keep one half of the bargain—but this also meant he could do whatever he wanted with me as the other half. I was completely at the mercy of a God who was sometimes merciful, and sometimes thought it was perfectly fine to put his own son on a fucking cross.
Which way would he choose for me? Which one would Saint Peter pick? The gold, the red, or the blue?
I guess I was about to find out.
With Jimmy Burrows’s words about impending fame still ringing in my ears, I figured I should take one last trip as an anonymous person.
Late in the summer of 1994 I flew alone to Mexico. I’d recently broken up with my girlfriend, Gaby, and decided to go on a booze cruise, solo. In Cabo, I wandered about, getting drunk and calling girls in LA from my room. Then, each night on the cruise, I’d head to some kind of weird party where everybody was all nervous until they brought out a jug of booze, then it was on. I was lonely; I didn’t get laid; it was hot in Cabo but cold inside me. I could feel God watching me, waiting. The most unnerving part was, I knew God was omniscient, which meant that he knew, already, what he had in store for me.
Friends premiered on Thursday, September 22, 1994. It initially hit number 17 in the rankings, which was really good for a brand-new show. The reviews were mostly stellar, too:
“Friends” … promises to be … offbeat and seductive.… The cast is appealing, the dialogue is pitch-perfect 1994.… “Friends” comes as close as a new series can get to having everything.
—The New York Times
“Friends” has so many good moves that there’s really nothing to dislike. It’s all so light and frothy that after each episode you may be hard-pressed to recall precisely what went on, except that you laughed a lot.
—Los Angeles Times
A game cast delivers the barrage of banter with an arch coyness that suggests they think they’re in some Gen X Neil Simon play.
—People
If fans of “Mad About You” and “Seinfeld” can handle the age difference, they should feel right at home with the six as they sit around riffing on life, love, relationships, jobs and each other.
—The Baltimore Sun
A couple of reviews hated it:
One character says he dreamed he had a telephone for a penis and when it rang, “it turns out it’s my mother.” And this is in the first five minutes. [It’s a] ghastly creation … so bad.… The stars include that cute Courteney Cox, formerly funny David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry. They all look nice, and it’s sad to see them degrading themselves.
—The Washington Post
Anemic and unworthy of its Thursday-night time slot.
—Hartford Courant
But then, Dick Rowe, an A&R man from Decca, in turning down the Beatles, told Brian Epstein in 1961 that “guitar groups are on their way out.” I wonder how those reviewers feel now, having dissed arguably the most beloved show of all time. They really missed the boat on that one. Had they also hated Seinfeld? M*A*S*H? Cheers? St. Elsewhere?
We were not on our way out. We were the very definition of prime time, when prime time still mattered. The gold rush of television. Even more important than the great reviews, we’d dropped only about 20 percent of the audience for Mad About You, which was an incredibly strong performance for a new show. By episode six, we were beating Mad About You, which meant we were a smash hit. Pretty soon we hit the top ten, then the top five, and we wouldn’t leave the top five for a decade. This is unheard of, still.
So here it was—fame. Just as we’d predicted, Friends was huge, and I couldn’t jeopardize that. I loved my co-actors, I loved the scripts, I loved everything about the show … but I was also struggling with my addictions, which only added to my sense of shame. I had a secret, and no one could know. And even making the shows could be painful. As I admitted at the reunion in 2020, “I felt like I was gonna die if [the live audience] didn’t laugh. And it’s not healthy for sure. But I would sometimes say a line, and they wouldn’t laugh, and I would sweat and—and just, like, go into convulsions. If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out. I felt like that every single night.”
This pressure left me in a bad place; and I also knew that of the six people making that show, only one of them was sick. The fame I’d yearned for had arrived, though—in London it was as if we were the Beatles, with people outside our hotel rooms screaming—and the show ended up covering the globe.
In late October 1995—between the airing of episodes five and six of season two—I flew to New York to notch my first appearance on the Late Show, when going on Letterman was the pinnacle of pop culture fame. I was in a dark suit—at one point, Letterman would finger my lapel and describe it as “late 1960s, British Invasion, kinda mod.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, this man is on the number one show in America, please welcome Matthew Perry.”
I sauntered out a star. I had made it. But I was so nervous I could barely stand, which was why I was quite happy to be sitting.
I shook hands with Mr. Letterman and dove into my well-rehearsed routine, a long description of a typical Gilligan’s Island episode. I somehow swung it so that I’d told the same story to Yasser Arafat, who was staying in my hotel (it was during the fiftieth anniversary of the UN, and everyone was in town). This was just the kind of bizarre, wordy story Letterman loved. The laughs landed—I even got Dave to crack a few times—and my earth-shattering fear had been properly hidden.
Everything was good. Everything was golden. I had just turned twenty-five. I was in the biggest sitcom on the planet; I was in a hotel in New York, watching as world leaders were hustled into elevators by flanks of security, putting on a thousand-dollar suit ahead of joshing it up with Dave Letterman.
This was fame. And just beyond the glare of the city, beyond the skyscrapers and the faint stars twinkling beyond the midtown skies, God looked down on me, just waiting it out. He’s got all the time in the world. Fuck, he invented time.
He wouldn’t forget. Something was looming. I had an idea what it was, but I did not know for sure. Something to do with drinking every night … but just how bad was it going to be?
The juggernaut was just getting going, though. The show was a cultural touchstone; we were getting mobbed everywhere we went (David Schwimmer would later tell the story that he was accosted by a gaggle of young women on the street who physically pushed his girlfriend out of the way to get near him). By late 1995, right around the time of the Letterman appearance, I also had a new, and very famous, girlfriend of my own. But before we get there, I had some unfinished business with the “other” Chandler.
I didn’t hear from Craig Bierko for two years after I got Chandler—he had moved to New York, and we lost touch.
Best Friends, the show he chose over Friends Like Us, had gone nowhere. (Later, Warren Littlefield, former network president of NBC, wrote in his memoir about Craig not choosing Friends, “Thank God! There was something Snidely Whiplash about Craig Bierko. He seemed to have a lot of anger underneath. The attractive leading man who you love and can do comedy is very rare.”) He was working steadily—he’d eventually star in The Music Man on Broadway and The Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis and Sam Jackson, among a lot of other really awesome stuff—but the divergence of our fortunes had left our friendship in flames.
I missed him. He was still the quickest comedic mind I’d ever met, and I loved that—and much else—about him. I could no longer go to the Formosa to just hang out, either; I missed that life, too. I’d taken to drinking alone in my apartment because that was safest. The illness was deepening, but I couldn’t see it, not then. And if anyone saw how much I was drinking, they might be alarmed and ask me to stop. And stopping was, of course, impossible.
One day, though, Craig Bierko called me out of the blue. He wanted to come by and see me. I was delighted, but apprehensive. You know that feeling when you end up dating someone your best friend had a crush on? It felt like that; I’d taken the role he could and should have taken, and everything had gone gold for me, then platinum, then some other rare metal as yet undiscovered.
I had no idea how a meeting with my former friend would go. Marta Kauffman would later comment, “We saw a countless number of actors [for Chandler], but things happened as they were supposed to happen.” But I couldn’t say anything like that to Craig, because the thing that was supposed to happen—the miracle—had happened to me, not to him. (That had been his choice, not mine.)
When he got to my apartment, the tension was high. Craig spoke first.
“I want you to know that I am very sorry for not speaking to you for two years,” he said. “I simply could not handle that you got rich and famous doing a role that I turned down. We were both good enough to get that role, and yeah, so, I just could not handle it.…”
I heard him out; there was a silence. The traffic on Sunset was backing up all the way to the Fred Segal on La Cienega.
I decided I wouldn’t mention Fred Segal.
I hated what I was actually about to say, but I had to say it.
I said: “You know what, Craig? It doesn’t do what we all thought it would. It doesn’t fix anything.” (What a sobering thought for a twenty-six-year-old who had only ever wanted fame and had only just realized that fame hadn’t filled the holes at all. No, what had filled the holes was vodka.)
Craig stared at me; I don’t think he believed me; I still don’t think he believes me. I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realize they are the wrong dreams.
Later, when I was promoting Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, I told The Guardian, “I’ve been on the least-watched show in the history of television [Second Chance, in 1987] and the most-watched [Friends] and none of it really did what I thought it was going to do to my life.”
Given everything, there is no way I wouldn’t change places with Craig, and David Pressman, and the guy in the gas station down the block—I’d change places with all of them in a minute, and forever, if only I could not be who I am, the way I am, bound on this wheel of fire. They don’t have a brain that wants them dead. They slept fine at night. I don’t expect that would make them feel any better about the choices they made, the way their lives went.
I would give it all up not to feel this way. I think about it all the time; it’s no idle thought—it’s a coldhearted fact. That Faustian prayer I made was a stupid one, the prayer of a child. It was not based on anything real.
But it became real.
I have the money, the recognizability, and the near-death experiences to prove it.