2023-11-01 13:18:32
Flowers and a photo in tribute to actor Matthew Perry, in front of the “Friends” building at 90 Bedford Street, in New York, October 30, 2023. MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS
If we except James Michael Tyler (Gunther, the bartender at Central Perk), who died prematurely of cancer in 2021, Matthew Perry is the first “friend” to pass away, also a little too early. He is above all the first of the gang of six, and the emotion which tinges the tributes paid in the media and on the networks says a lot about the sympathy that continued to arouse the character of Chandler Bing and his interpreter. His death, Saturday October 28, in a way puts an end to the series, almost twenty years after its last episode. We will never see Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Ross, Joey and Chandler together again.
Read the obituary: Article reserved for our subscribers With the death of Matthew Perry, “Friends” loses its Chandler Bing
The circumstances of his death, although still obscure, suggest a body that gave up after having struggled a lot. The public was able to measure the physical deterioration of the actor during his participation in the program “Friends: the reunion” organized in 2021 (the show, produced by HBO, was broadcast in France on the defunct Salto platform), although, at the time of recording, Matthew Perry had been sober for eighteen months. We knew he wasn’t doing well, we had read about it in the celebrity press, but at this point? Opiates, heroin, alcohol… If we look through the memoirs he wrote – alone, which is rare in the industry – and published in 2022, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (translated into French under the title Friends my loves and this terrible thingat Michel Lafon), we especially wonder how he managed to live until the age of 54 on this diet.
Of the “troop of friends”, Matthew Perry was undoubtedly the most technical. And to say that he has never inhabited a role as fully as that of Chandler Bing is no offense to him. Especially since this character of a sarcastic financier, clumsy in love, precursor of cringe and full of strange behaviors (who forgot his habit of dancing every time something important happens to him?), had everything to be less lovable than Joey (Matt LeBlanc), the idiot heartthrob, or Ross (David Schwimmer) , the stuck paleontologist. It was perhaps, on the contrary, the most constructed and endearing character of the sitcom created by Marta Kauffman and David Crane, with that of Monica (Courteney Cox). These two crazy people didn’t end up together for nothing.
Read the series break column: Article reserved for our subscribers “Friends: The Reunion”, a reunion that plays on nostalgia
For those who have forgotten the actor’s burlesque talent and the precision of his acting, just go and search on YouTube searching for countless best of Chandler scenes. Between the « shut up ! ! ! ! » from the sofa scene (season 5, episode 16, the best of the entire series), the attempt at a mustache during season 2 and the desk drawer to which he is voluntarily handcuffed by Rachel’s boss (season 4) , we let you choose.
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