Matthew Perry Biography

Matthew Perry was the television star best known as the wisecracking Chandler Bing on the series Friends (1994-2004).

Matthew Perry spent his younger years with his mother in Canada, where he competed on the junior tennis circuit. As a teenager he moved to Los Angeles (where his father, actor John Bennett Perry, lived and worked) and switched from tennis to acting. In the late 1980s he worked steadily in television and appeared with River Phoenix in the feature film A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988).

In 1994 he began playing Chandler in Friends, a weekly comedy about six young chums in New York City that became one of the decade’s most popular TV shows. The success of the series made stars out of Perry and the rest of the cast, including Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow. By the end of the show’s 10-season run, each of the six were earning a million dollars per episode, and persistent reruns over the following decades kept them all in the public eye.

Matthew Perry also appeared in feature films, including the action comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000, Bruce Willis), but remained more successful on television. He was nominated for Emmys in 2003 and 2004 for a small but memorable role on The West Wing (starring Martin Sheen), and earned critical praise for his short-lived 2006 series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. That show was quickly canceled, however, and he returned to TV in 2011 in the sitcom Mr. Sunshine (co-starring Allison Janney).

Over the years he continued to appear on TV, starring as Oscar Madison in a reboot of The Odd Couple (2015-17) and playing Ted Kennedy in the 2017 miniseries The Kennedys After Camelot.

In later years, Perry became notorious for his years-long struggles with drugs and alcohol. He wrote a 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, in which he spoke frankly about using drugs and alcohol during his time on Friends and beyond.

Matthew Perry died in 2023 at his home in an afternoon incident, when his assistant found him floating face-down in his hot tub, a few hours after Perry had returned from a pickleball game. The coroner ruled that the primary cause of death was the effects of the anesthetic ketamine, with contributing factors of coronary artery disease and buprenorphine, which is used to treat opioid use disorders.