2023-10-29 19:30:44
On September 22, 1994, a star named Chandler Bing was born who eclipsed Matthew Perry. The character devoured the Massachusetts actor just as his roles did with his other five co-stars (Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer). He was born ‘Friends’ to become television history.
The numbers are overwhelming: ten years on air, 235 episodes broadcast, more than 20 million viewers per episode on average and 53 million Americans watched the last episode of the series. Millions of fans around the world, many of whom were children when the series ended in 2004, remembered this Sunday their favorite scenes, Chandler’s most remembered phrases and gestures after learning that Perry had died. His body was found in the jacuzzi of his Los Angeles home on Saturday afternoon. He was 54 years old.
The actor had led a normal day. He did sports in the morning, then returned to his house in Malibu and sent his assistant to run an errand, according to TMZ. Upon his return, this employee found him unconscious and called the emergency services, who could do nothing for his life. The Los Angeles Police have opened an investigation, but some sources indicated that no drugs had been found near the place of death and that the hypothesis of drowning is being considered. Perry was struggling with a new relapse of his addictions to both drugs and alcohol. “People would be surprised to know that I have been almost sober since 2001, except for about 60 or 70 small mishaps over the years,” the actor wrote in ‘Friends, Lovers and That So Terrible,’ the stark memoir he published last year.
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He had his first drink when he was 14 years old. A year later she left Williamstown, where she was born on August 19, 1969, to move to Los Angeles with her father, actor John Bennett Perry. He and his mother, Suzanne Marie Morrison (press chief of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, father of the current president) had divorced when he was little. In California, at the age of 15, this American-Canadian dreamed of being a professional tennis player, but he realized that his opponents were better than him.
He decided that he had to find something else that would fulfill him and acting crossed his path. He had small roles in television series (two episodes in ‘Highway to Heaven’, three in ‘Problems Grow’ or one in ‘Sensación de vivir’, for example) until at the age of 24 he got the opportunity with ‘Friends’. . Three years earlier he had already realized that he was an alcoholic.
Security device on the street where the actor’s house is located. AFP
Money and fame
‘Friends’ became his happy place where he took refuge to escape his demons. «I had a reason to get up every day. “I did not miss the recording of any chapter,” she highlighted a few years ago. Television also gave him a brief courtship with Julia Roberts, a relationship that began by fax to get a cameo from the actress and ended in a breakup because he felt inferior. In 1997, he began using drugs. An accident with a jet ski filming ‘Only Fools Fall in Love’ caused him to take painkillers. “A year later, I was taking 55 pills like that every day,” he confessed. Drugs washed down with a liter of vodka.
Followers of the series were aware of Perry’s weight fluctuations depending on what he consumed at any given time. «If she gained weight it was because of alcohol. If she lost weight, it was because of the pills. “If she had a goatee, she was really messing with me,” said Perry, who claimed to have detoxified about 65 times and had spent about 9 million euros in the process. Money was not a problem. ‘Friends’ made him a millionaire. The six protagonists, who reunited for a special on HBO a year ago, earned a million dollars for each episode of their final season. «I don’t need to work, but I need it. “Fame is indifferent to me,” he noted about his tortuous past and present.
The cast of ‘Friends’, with the Emmy that the series won in 2002. AFP
Getting out of Chandler’s suit wasn’t easy. He starred in ‘Studio 60’, a series created by Aaron Sorkin after ‘The West Wing’ that only lasted one season; the same time as ‘Mr Sunshine’ or ‘Go On’. Both were situation comedies, a genre that he did not abandon in ‘The Odd Couple’. He became serious in his appearances in ‘The Good Wife’, ‘The Good Fight’ or ‘The Kennedys After Camelot’, where he played Ted Kennedy. He never abandoned comedy in his forays into film, where he debuted with River Phoenix in ‘Jimmy Reardon’. One of the most successful is ‘Falsas Appearances’, which had the second part of it. In this film, Perry made a bet with Bruce Willis, his co-star. If the film reached number one at the box office, he had to make a cameo in the series. Willis appeared in three episodes of ‘Friends’.
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