Originally appeared on E! Online
Jennifer Aniston will always be there for Matthew Perry.
Over a year after her “Friends” costar died at 54 in his California home, the actor reflected on how she and the other core cast members — including Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt Leblanc, and David Schwimmer — tried to help him fight his battle with addiction.
“We did everything we could when we could,” Aniston, 56, told Vanity Fair in an interview published on August 11. “But it almost felt like we’d been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight.”
Indeed, Perry — who starred as Chandler Bing in the NBC sitcom — detailed his decades-long struggle with drugs and alcohol in his 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” Most notably, he revealed that Aniston “was the one who reached out the most” amid his road to sobriety, and that she confronted him about his pattern with drinking.
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Though he was 18 months sober at the time of the book’s release, the “17 Again” star died in October 2023 due to acute effects of ketamine. And as Aniston continues to mourn the late actor, she’s approaching his death in a new comforting way.
“As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better,” the “Marley & Me” star continued to Vanity Fair. “I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”
Aniston’s heartfelt words come months after she remembered Perry on the first anniversary of his passing. In her Instagram post, she shared several photos of them bonding on the set of “Friends,” further honoring him with a dove and healed heart emoji.
Cox, 61, echoed the sentiment in her own tribute, which featured a touching photo of all five cast members hugging.
“Miss you today,” she wrote at the time. “And always.”
That same month, Perry’s mom Suzanne Morrison detailed her final moments with her late son.
“He went through a period, interestingly enough, just before he died when he was showing me one of his new houses,” she told Today’s Savannah Guthrie. “He came up to me and he said, ‘I love you so much, and I’m so happy to be with you now. And I’m so…’ It was almost as though it was a premonition or something.”
And while she’ll always cherish that moment, Morrison — who shared “The Whole Nine Yards” star with ex-husband John Bennett Perry — believes their interaction was a chilling window into his future.
“I didn’t think about it at the time, but I thought, ‘How long has it been since we’ve had a conversation like that?’ It’s been years,” she recalled, before adding that “there was an inevitability to what was going to happen next to him, and he felt it very strongly.”
(E! and Today are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)
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PHOTOSGwyneth Paltrow, Matthew Perry
