Fame almost destroyed Friends star Matthew Perry. Now, as he makes his West End stage debut, he tells Neil Norman how he beat his addictions.

Matthew Perry looks great. This is not, I realise, a particularly profound observation but given his history, it is significant. It wasn’t that long ago that Perry looked very far from great. “I was one of those people who thought that fame would bring happiness,” he says. “So if I hadn’t had it, I’d still be chasing it. It’s fortunate that, as a result of doing Friends, I became very famous and I know now that it is not all great.”

One of the consequences of fame is that if you’ve had an interesting history, complete with alcohol and drug-related problems, and have been photographed in various stages of addiction and splashed all over the tabloids, then the preconceptions about where you are at, right here, right now, are set in stone. Sitting opposite Perry in the smart but comfortable confines of the Century Club there is little evidence of his past misdeeds, in either his face or figure. God knows, we’ve seen him fat, we’ve seen him thin. We’Ve seen him bloated with vodka and Vicodin and all manner of incremental vices. This is one 34-year-old who’s been there, done that - and got the hair-shirt.

But in the post-Friends guise of young American actor about to embark on the (now) traditional testing ground of the West End stage, he is the picture of health. Lightly tanned, healthily stubbled, smiling. He smokes cigarettes and drinks coffee - but not in an addict sort of way.
Perry is in rehearsal for the West End revival of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a sulphurous comedy drama of bad manners and sexual mores among youngish professional types in the Windy city during the Seventies. It’s a bleak and bitter view of heterosexual relationship - a prototype entry in the genre that the film director Neil Labute mined two decades later. It was filmed in 1986 as About Last Night… with Demi Moore and Rob Lowe.

“As a matter of fact, I was a huge fan of that movie when it first came out,” says Perry. “But they really softened it up. It is a very brutal play and it poses the questions but doesn’t necessarily give the answers. If we do our job right, they’ll be standing around talking outside the theatre and missing the train home. In television or a movie I bring my own ego and consequently can mess up. In the theatre I learnt very quickly to shut up and listen. Now I am able to get out of my own way.”

Staying out of his own way is a phrase he repeats in one form or another like a mantra. Sobriety has brought a clarity of thought and self-awareness that necessitates “smashing your ego”. So far it seems to be having a beneficial effect.
Intriguingly, Perry tells me that he had auditioned for the same play two years before Friends. He is not unaware of the irony. “I auditioned for a production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago about 12 years ago for a 35-seat theatre on Melrose in L.A. I didn’T get a call back. And now I get a call in my trailer on a Bruce Willis movie, being offered the lead in the same play.”
He doesn’t have to add: “Go figure”.

Friends, of course, is a phenomenon. The deceptively simple set-up allows for maximum interplay between six characters who are not so much in search of an author (the “Gag Gulag” contains the customarily high number of script writers for US television series) as a meaning to their lives. The group maintains a one-for-all-and-all-for-one policy on the show, which is particularly useful when it comes to negotiating fees - its last egg next January, when the series comes to an end after nearly 10 years. Will he miss it?
“Yes. It’s been my ideal job. You go to work at 9am and get to be funny all day and get paid. There isn’t a jerk in the crew. I had no idea how huge the show was going to be. But it seemed like magic from the very first run-through.”

Perry is not the first - nor will he be the last - to have been caught between the rock of celebrity and the hard place of mucho moolah. But the fact that he managed to survive says much about his strength of character. “It’s actually not a matter of strength,” he says. “Alcoholics and addicts are not the strongest-willed people in town. It’s about having a crossroads in your life and seeing a moment of clarity. It is about surrender rather than strength. I can’t take too much credit for it. It’s like somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘Do you want to live or do you want to die?’ I chose to live. I suppose there is a certain own inflated ego. ‘To stay out of you own way’ - that’s a key term for sobriety. It’s like smashing any illusions you have about stars. I mean, going to go back to my “flat” and read my lines and get a frozen dinner and go to sleep. You can’t imagine Paul Newman doing that. We are pedestalised and it serves its purpose. But when you personalise it you become miserable and a jerk because it is not real. And it took a life change for me to see that.”

Fame and money and good looks also bring the inevitable gallery of high-profile girlfriends, Julia Roberts, Heather Graham and Jennifer Capriati are just some of the names with whom he has been linked. He is, he says, aware of the fact that serious friendships have to be earned. And he anticipates becoming a father. “Family? Yeah. I think that’s one of the reasons we’re here. To have kids.”
Meanwhile, he is happily dating a girl called Rachel Dunn who, he is relieved to reveal, is not in the wonderful business called show. “I have a girl in New York. Nobody famous. She called me yesterday with the hockey scores.” He grins hugely, drains the last of his coffee.
“Now, I ask you. What better thing could a girl do?”

Matthew Perry leaves the sexual diversity of Friends in New York for Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Except that he’s in London, co-starring with minnie Driver in a revival of the 1974 battle-of-the-sexes drama. It’s his first professional stage performance.
By Jennifer Selway

Minnie, me
It’s a great title - Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The best. Or, as one of the characters might say, “You’re not f***ing kidding.” It could be the title of a particularly marketable PhD thesis; the reference to Chicago is the cherry on the cake. The most intellectual and mythically corrupt of American cities - surely its brand of sexual perversity will be of a higher order.

The playwright David Mamet is one of Chicago’s most famous sons, author of American Buffalo and Oleanna. Since the mid-’70s when Sexual Perversity was written, he has continued to spread his talents into screenwriting and directing. in 1984, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, which he also adapted for cinema. Other screen credits include The Verdict, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Wag the Dog. “Why deal with Hollywood?” he once said. “It’s screamingly good fun. It pays very, very well. And it’s the big table, and as a gambler I always wanted to play at the big table. I’m not an ascetic. I’m greedy and ambitious like everybody else.”

Sexual Perversity is a young man’s play, about four singles looking for love, which makes the casting of Friends star Matthew Perry (as Danny) all the more apposite. Danny and his friend Bernie (Hank Azaria) are just two regular guys, hanging out in bars and at beaches, looking for women. Bernie is a foul-mouthed fantasist, his attitude towards women summed up in Bernie’s Theory on Broads: “The way to get laid is to treat ‘em like s***.” Joan (Minnie Driver) and her friend Deborah (Kelly Reilly) are rather more self-aware but no freer. We are all, recognizes Joan, “trying to fit ourselves to a pattern we can neither understand (although we pretend to) nor truly afford to investigate (although we pretend to)”. “It’s about relationships between men and women and it’s about how our sexual relationships affect friendships,” says Azaria. “In the play, Danny gets involved with Deborah. It’s his first serious affair and it ends in disaster, and it’s obvious throughout that Bernie is jealous - he feels betrayed that Danny seems to be treating a woman as anything other than an object.”

Hollywood on Stage
This revival provides another opportunity for Hollywood stars to show what they’re made of on the London stage. Our home-grown Minnie Driver is now A-list Hollywood, as is Matthew Perry. Azaria, though less well known here, has worked with them both. He has made several guest appearances in Friends and appeared with Driver in the film Grosse Point Blank. He is also the voice of Apu, bartender Moe and Police Chief Wiggum in The Simpsons. A job for life there? “I hope so”, says Azaria. “I knew The Simpsons would be good, but I never thought it would last so long. Usually, clever stuff on TV gets penalised. Although Friends is taped in front of a life audience, it’s been about five years since I’ve done any theatre, so this is a little bit scary, though I’ve heard that West End audiences are very smart and enthusiastic.” Of course we are: undoubtedly we shall be alert to any lapses in the distinctive Chicagoan accent which the cast has to master in order to give full value to Mamet’s famously demotic dialogue.

“All realism means is that the language strikes a responsive chord,” says Mamet. “The language in my plays is not realistic, it is poetic.” While the play deals with the universal theme of how men and women see each other, it is something of a period piece, and has been set accordingly in the 1970s. “It’s of its period but not dated,” says producer Mark Rubinstein. “Fashion changes about what is acceptable. If you’d done it five or 10 years ago, people would have bridled more about it being non-PC, and about the male characters’s sexism. Now I think we just see the sadness of the male characters - particularly Bernie, who is all talk and no action.”

“It’s very real,” agrees Azaria. “All we guys have a part of us that is for ever Bernie and Danny. Though I kind of hope it’s something I’ve grown out of.” The Likely Lads Bernie and Danny ain’t. They’re not much like the nice guys in Friends either, in one scene, Bernie describes how a bit of innocent towel-flicking with his one-night stand turns into actual bodily assault with a clock radio. It’s dark stuff, still shocking a quarter of a century after it was written. The fact is that Mamet’s take on the American Dream is that success is only possible at the expense of someone else. “That’s what forms the basis of our economic life,” he has said. “And that is what forms the rest of our lives.”

It’s a predatory, dog-eat-dog world view, cynical and negative. At least, that’s what Mamet’s critics have always complained. “But also there’s an enormous amount of humour”, insists Rubinstein. “And there are no real goodies or baddies, just characters - and you feel sympathy for all of them.”
The significance of David Mamet’s work lies in his ability to outrage and divide his audience. his play Oleanna (also made into a film) achieved this with the story of a university teacher accused of rape by a woman student. Some critics thought it reactionary, others refreshingly frank. Even today - notwithstanding that lucrative Hollywood career - Mamet, now 56, maintains a kind of heroic warrior status among playwrights.

Azaria (who first appeared in Sexual Perversity when he was at college) says, “He was my idol at high school. I love his writing.” The Mamet mythology is aided by his attitude to critics and public. The BBC arts pundit Mark Lawson cites him as one of hs most difficult ever interviews. Asked a simple question about Terence Rattigan, Mamet mischievously responded with a shaggy-dog story. When New Yorker profiler John Lahr met him, Mamet presented him with a Boy Scout knife bearing the minatory inscription, “Be Prepared.” You have been warned.