Matthew Perry: How the ‘Friends’ star met Julia Roberts

He doesn’t mince his words. In his autobiography Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry describes how he started drinking when he was 14 and couldn’t stop. He was an alcoholic when he started acting in Los Angeles and he was an alcoholic when he landed the role of his life. Chandler Bing in the cult sitcom Friends.

Matthew Perry: How the ‘Friends’ star met Julia Roberts

A prominent star guest in the second season of the series was Julia Roberts, already a celebrated film star at the time. As Perry explains in his book, Roberts only agreed on one condition: she would get a storyline alongside his character, Chandler. So “Friends” producer Marta Kauffman asked Perry to get in touch with Roberts to convince her. And he did it, as he himself describes, in a creative way with a personal card.

“I sent her three dozen red roses and the card said, ‘The only thing more exciting than you being on the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,'” she recalled he himself. The beginning of something bigger than a simple guest appearance. Because between Perry and Roberts lively contact developed. Via fax, after all, there were few other options in the mid-1990s. “She replied that if I explain quantum physics properly to her, she’ll be fine. Wow. First I’ll talk to the woman for whom lipstick was invented, and then I have to get to the books,” says Perry. He was impressed by her intellect and her charm – and she was obviously impressed by his.

“But three or four times a day I sat in front of my fax machine and watched it slowly spit out her next letter. I got so excited that some nights at a party I broke off flirting with an attractive woman, rushed home and checked whether a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of ten there was one,” writes the actor. When Roberts’ tone in a fax became more “romantic,” Perry consulted a good friend and drafted a reply letter with him.

He broke up with her

“‘Call me,’ she wrote, with her phone number at the bottom. I picked up the phone and called Julia Roberts. I was super nervous, like I was when I first appeared on Letterman. But we immediately struck up a conversation — me made her laugh, and what a laugh,” he reveals in his autobiography. The relationship between the two lasted a few months. Perry met Roberts’ parents, he says in his memoirs. And she spoke about him on the Letterman talk show. The “Friends” episode in which she appeared was one of the most successful to date. “Our kiss on the couch was so real, people thought it was real. It was, too. Julia was wonderful in the episode, and all of America watched TV to see the chemistry between us.” writes Perry himself about the episode.

But the relationship was doomed to fail. Not because there was no love, but because Perry’s demons were too big. “The relationship with Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I was constantly certain that she would break up with me – why wouldn’t she? I wasn’t good enough; I never would be. I was broken, screwed up , unlovable,” he said. “So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. She had gotten involved with a TV fuzzy and the TV fuzzy broke up with her. I can’t describe how confused she is looked at me,” he writes.

When Julia Roberts won her Oscar for “Erin Brockovich,” Perry watched on TV. He was at the time – again – in rehab, watching the ceremony with other addicts. “I was no longer one of those people on TV. No, I was now one of those people I lay in front of, shivering and wrapped in blankets. And I was lucky to have them. They saved my life,” he describes the situation in his book.

Matthew Perry’s autobiography “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” (Bastei Lübbe Verlag) will be available in stores from November 1st.

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