Matthew Perry, who reached stardom in the sitcom world as Chandler Bing on the show Friends, helping turn it into a ratings juggernaut, died on Oct. 28. He was 54 years old.

Police said there was no indication of foul play, and while early reports said Perry drowned in a hot tub, the Los Angeles medical examiner has not yet determined a cause of death. Perry was open with the public about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. In an Oct. 22 interview, Perry said he spent nearly half his life and $9 million on treatment and rehabilitation.

JOB OPENINGS UNEXPECTEDLY ROSE IN SEPTEMBER AMID HIGH INTEREST RATES

Friends ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. The show chronicled the lives and foibles of six friends who lived in New York City. Chandler was the wisecracking yuppie of the bunch (who were largely the butt of his remarks and his famous rhetorical sarcastic questions) and the most successful, though the writers kept his career deliberately vague for almost the entire run of the show.

Matthew Langford Perry was born on Aug. 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His mother Suzanne was the press secretary for Pierre Trudeau, and his father John was a character actor. His parents divorced when he was young, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather, Keith Morrison, the celebrated storyteller on the long-running NBC series, Dateline.

He moved to Los Angeles to live with his father when he was 15, and it was at that young age that he decided the best way to achieve true happiness was to reach Hollywood stardom. Early on, he had minor roles in some films and sitcoms, but it wasn’t until he got the part in Friends that he achieved genuine success.

Perry achieved that fame. In the first season of Friends, he made $22,500 per episode. As the six cast members negotiated salaries collectively, they remained equal among the stars throughout the series. In the final two seasons of the show, Perry and his co-stars made $1 million per episode, making them some of the highest-paid television actors of all time. The success did not come without its darker side.

It wasn’t long before Perry began his battle with drugs and alcohol. In his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, he recalled a time when co-star Jennifer Aniston, who played Rachel Green on the show, visited him in his trailer and let him know the others knew he had a drinking problem, remarking they could all smell it on him while on set. In his memoir, he also detailed how a Jet Ski accident in 1997 got him addicted to prescription painkillers, recalling that at one point, he took over 50 pills a day. When he finally checked himself into rehab, he weighed around 130 pounds, a dangerously low weight for someone 6 feet tall.

In a New York Times profile in 2022, Perry detailed the medical fallout from his addiction that included “pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries.”

Perry’s career outside of Friends was a mixed bag. His performance in the 2000 film The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis was well-received. He starred in the television series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — an Aaron Sorkin-written series that NBC canceled after only one season. He also starred in an adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple on CBS for three seasons, a series for which he was also the executive producer. Ironically, the actor who played the clean-cut, well-dressed Chandler in Friends took on the role of the slob, Oscar Madison, in the Odd Couple series.

Perry, like his co-stars from Friends, never had money concerns. In deals typically reserved for those with an ownership stake in a television series (such as Jerry Seinfeld), the cast received a 2% residual deal for the show’s syndication. Reports have said Perry and his co-stars earned $20 million per year from the deal. That residual will continue to get paid to whoever is the beneficiary or beneficiaries in his will.

He never married and had no children. Perry dated Yasmine Bleeth in 1995, Julia Roberts from 1995 to 1996, and had a six-year relationship with Lizzy Caplan from 2006 to 2012. He got engaged to literary manager Molly Hurwitz in November 2020, but the engagement was called off in 2021. He had four half sisters and one half brother from his parents’ later marriages.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Jay Caruso is a writer and editor residing in West Virginia.