Friends premiered 30 years ago. That number feels impossibly high and yet also completely inconsequential, considering how Matthew Perry 's sudden death on Oct. 28, 2023, made so many people feel as if they'd lost someone who was still playing an active role in their lives.
Cue the catharsis in the form of Chandler Bing appreciators everywhere wondering whether the news could be any more tragic. But while countless fans felt connected to Perry in some way, mostly from his Emmy-nominated run on Friends but also from a series of other characters the multifaceted actor inhabited over the course of his four-decade career , there were only so many people who knew him. Only so many who were actually there to witness his undeniable talent up close and watch him struggle through the life-threatening lows that Perry himself was surprised to have survived .
For 10 years, it was Jennifer Aniston , Courteney Cox , Lisa Kudrow , Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer who saw Perry almost every day, who laughed with him, loved him and were inevitably very worried about him. And yet, as Kudrow noted in the foreword to Perry's 2022 book Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir , she didn't know until reading the full story in those very pages just how harrowing his experience really was. "He has survived impossible odds," she wrote, "but I had no idea how many times he almost didn't make it.
I'm glad you're here, Matty." Perry credited his Friends co-stars with supporting him whenever .