“God, you can do whatever you want to me, just please make me famous.” So prayed Matthew Perry when he was a young unknown actor auditioning in LA, enjoying the partying and the friendships but struggling to find work. Many have offered up such a fervent wish, of course; few have had both sides of it fulfilled in such a spectacular way as the man who became part of one of the most successful sitcoms in television history and who died after relapsing into drug addiction in 2023 at the age of just 54.
The three-part, three-hour documentary – titled, perhaps inevitably, The One About Matthew Perry – charts the whole of the actor’s rise and fall. It is an exhaustive but never (quite) exhausting film. Three hours is a long time, for sure, to tell what is in essence a sad but very simple tale, and some tiny trims could undoubtedly have been made, but it avoids tedium because of the quality of the interviews and the interviewees. The latter include his half-sister Mia and his best friends since his first days in LA, Roger Castillo and David Pressman. They all talk about the brother and the man with such love and such despair at the addictions he could not beat that it becomes at points not just a moving tribute to Perry but also to the thousands upon thousands of addicts and the people who love and despair of them, but whose stories don’t make international headlines.
Perry’s parents divorced when he was a baby and he lived with his mother in Canada but flew frequently to California (his memoir details his terror, at five, of making the trip alone with a strap reading “Unaccompanied minor” around his head) to see his father, the actor John Bennett Perry. Mia was born to John and Matthew’s stepmother when Matthew was 16 and it is clear from family photos and video footage that they adored each other from the beginning. She talks about “Matty” and the good times they shared and the bad times he put her through with the warmth and grief that is the mark of the truly loved – and the loving ones left behind.
His friends do likewise. So too do a handful of ex-girlfriends. Normally the presence of exes not only makes you fear the worst but delivers it too, but here there is no mud slung, no sense of producers glorying in a “find” who turns out to have nothing to say. They all give fond, eloquent accounts of the man they knew – focusing, like Mia, on the good things but not skipping over the bad stuff and his failings, paying us and him the courtesy of providing a portrait of the man entire.
After a childhood that may have been slightly peripatetic but seems to have been loving and essentially stable, Perry – the class clown from an early age – went out to LA to see if he could parlay his comic talents into a career. It worked. Director William Richert saw him making a group of companions laugh in a restaurant and cast him as River Phoenix’s best friend in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, which I think makes Matthew Perry, however unexpectedly, the Lana-Turner-in-Schwab’s-drugstore of the 90s, though as he noted in an interview with another friend, Kevin Pollak, years later (for a laugh – always for a laugh): “It would have been a better story if anyone had seen the movie.”
Then, in 1993, a script for a new show called Friends Like Us began circulating. By the time Perry got a call to audition, he was already knew the lines because so many of his peers had asked him to help prep for theirs; this guy in it, Chandler, was so like him they felt Matty could really help.
The programme gives the phenomenon of Friends its due but, like the decision to keep mawkishness at bay, rises above expectations by not dwelling on it or letting it overwhelm the subject – even if, at points in real life, it did the man.
Then come the years of addiction – to booze first, then pills, then the ketamine that initially promised to lift his depression but which eventually killed him – and the many, many efforts to get sober. They are described in his memoir, but it is here that you see the pain on his family and friends’ faces as they remember his and their frustration as each attempt ended, never more than a year later, in relapse. Mia notes in her interviews that their father supported his son through everything, probably partly out of guilt for not being fully around as a parent in his childhood, and that he would have loved to have contributed to this film but that he is now too ill to do so. It’s a mixture of honesty and an evocation of a close, if complicated, family background that characterises all her contributions.
It remains at heart a simple, sad story. But this unexpectedly candid, thoughtful, genuinely intimate film gives it nuance and depth, and gives a voice to wider sorrows – including what a shame it was that Perry could not enjoy his talent or appreciate the joy it gave as fully as his audiences always did.
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The One About Matthew Perry is on Netflix
