It was impossible not to fall for Chandler Bing in the sitcom Friends.
He didn’t get along with girls (except with the insufferable Janice. Oh. My. God!). He hated his 9 to 5 administrative job, which no one, even him, really understood. He took refuge in sarcasm to avoid intimacy and closeness.
He continually blundered. He fought against his vices, including cigarettes. He possessed, like his interpreter Matthew Perry, a natural charm and a look that was both mischievous and sad.
Could he have been more adorable and funny?
This last sentence must be pronounced with emphasis on the verb “to be”, in Chandler’s jerky phrasing invented by actor Matthew Perry and which still resonates on millions of screens all over the world.
With the tragic departure of Matthew Perry, found dead in his hot tub on Saturday, viewers lost a prodigious friend, who encapsulated in a single sardonic character an entire section of Generation X, anxious, resigned, addicted to black coffee and quest for a new family model, the one we choose.
Metrosexual before his time, this slobbering and needy Chandler Bing could have been extra-detestable without the immense talent of Matthew Perry, the undisputed master of the scathing retort (he wrote several of his own gags in Friends). Yes, Chandler bombarded his five best friends with acid remarks, but he also showed them great vulnerability and unfailing loyalty.
This tragi-comic balance made Chandler Bing the mirror of Matthew Perry, one of the most well-known, striking and beloved characters of the 1990s and 2000s. Under this thick layer of self-deprecation – and superimposed clothing – hid a great romantic and a tormented young man.
More cunning than the charming actor Joey (Matt LeBlanc) and less psychorigid than the paleontologist Ross (David Schwimmer), Chandler was more like us with his alienating job, his romantic failures and his jokes directed at him, thus attracting our unwavering sympathy. As in STATI would have sold one of my kidneys in Romania to attend a recording of Friends and drink a latte from a huge mug at Central Perk. Smelly Cat, anyone?
The Crave platform still offers all ten seasons of Friendswhich will remain the ultimate comfort comedy when it’s not your day, your week, your month or even your year. I’ll Be There for Yousang the group The Rembrandts long before Marilou and Gino Quilico released the extract I’ll be there for you.
At the time, no one suspected that this highly gifted Canadian-American actor, who grew up in Ottawa, would suffer so much to entertain fans of Friends. Like the terrible cases of Robin Williams and Chris Farley, the clown was sad and very sick.
Matthew Perry, 54, recounts his alcoholism and drug addiction with frankness and humor in his excellent autobiographical book Friends, my loves and this terrible thing. He downed his first bottle of wine – the whole thing – at 14, and by 18 he was drinking every day.
This is following a watercraft accident on the set of the film Fools Rush In, in the summer of 1997, that Matthew Perry developed an addiction to opioids, a powerful pain medication. He swallowed up to 55 tablets per day, which he drowned in vodka (one liter daily) and mixed with anxiolytics, eight milligrams of Ativan every 24 hours during the worst of his descent into hell.
IMAGE FROM THE MOVIE FOOLS RUSH IN
Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek, in Fools Rush In
He came close to death several times. He lost his upper teeth while biting into toast. His colon exploded in 2018 and doctors estimated his chance of survival at 2%. On TV, his weight fluctuated to the rhythm of his addictive behaviors.
In the third season of Friends, where he took a lot of pills, Matthew Perry floated in his hoodies and weighed 128 pounds and stood 6 feet tall. When he sported a goatee, it was because he was falling to the bottom of the barrel. And when he was close to 225 pounds, he experienced a perpetual wakefulness.
He was only sober during the ninth season of Friends, which he judges to be his best. Unlike Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry has never won an Emmy award for Friendswhen he was the brightest of the group.
The most tragic thing is that Matthew Perry made 65 trips to rehab and squandered nearly 10 million on various treatments to cure himself. And after almost 30 years of relapses, he had finally expelled the drug from his body.
After so much excess, Matthew Perry, who also smoked like a chimney, was surprised to be still alive. The news of his death should not have been a surprise to anyone. However, even if we suspected that his body was worn and broken, his departure was a shock: Perry died alone, in his immense villa in Los Angeles.
Tons of money, worldwide success and a girlfriend like Julia Roberts (whom he dumped in 1996) will not have made him happy or saved him from the abyss.
The official cause of Matthew Perry’s death has not yet been publicly revealed. Perhaps his tired heart gave out. In any case, our hearts, admirers of this great deadpan actor, are in a thousand pieces. And the leather lazy-boy in the apartment across the street from Monica’s has never been so empty.