Jennifer Aniston just came out with an unexpected, wistful comment about her โFriendsโ co-star Matthew Perryโs death: Part of her, she said, thinks it might be โbetterโ for him that he died.
โWe did everything we could when we could,โ the โMorning Showโ star said in an interview published Monday by Vanity Fair, talking about Perryโs friendsโ attempts to help him when he was struggling with addiction. โBut it almost felt like weโd been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight.โ
Indeed, Perry discussed his friendsโ efforts to help him in his 2022 memoir, โFriends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,โ which recounted his decades-long struggles with substance abuse as well as his numerous recovery efforts.
โAlthough he asserts he was never high while filming โFriends,โ heโd often be sick or hungover,โ former staff writer Christina Veta wrote in The Timesโ review of the memoir. โOnce, Perry passed out on the Central Perk couch and [co-star Matt] LeBlanc had to nudge him awake to say his line. Later, Aniston called him out for drinking again, telling him, โWe can smell it.โโ
Perry told Aniston, โI know Iโm drinking too much, but I donโt exactly know what to do about it.โ
โIn nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until itโs better,โ he wrote in his memoir. โThis is what my costars on Friends did for me. There were times on set when I was extremely hungover, and Jen and Courteney [Cox], being devoted to cardio as a cure-all, had a Lifecycle exercise bike installed backstage. In between rehearsals and takes, Iโd head back there and ride that thing like the fires of hell were chasing me โ anything to get my brain power back to normal. I was the injured penguin, but I was determined to not let these wonderful people, and this show, down.โ
Aniston told Vanity Fair in the new interview, โlooking solemn and out toward the oceanโ as she spoke about Perryโs death, โAs hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, thereโs a part of me that thinks this is better. Iโm glad heโs out of that pain.โ
Perry said in his memoir that amid all his drinking and drug use, he was never suicidal.
โIn the back of my mind I always had some semblance of hope. But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept,โ he wrote about the period after โFriendsโ ended.
โThatโs how skewed my thinking had become โ I was able to hold those two things in my mind at the same time: I donโt want to die, but if I have to in order to get sufficient drugs on board, then amen to oblivion.โ
Almost exactly a year after the memoir came out, on Oct. 28, 2024, at 4 in the afternoon, Perry was found dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home. The drug ketamine would later emerge as his official cause of death, with drowning a contributing factor.
