Matthew Perry’s role in Friends brought him fame and fortune - but it didn’t make him happy. Now, after a well- publicised fight against his addictions, he’s concentrating all his energies on acting, and braving a lead role on the West End stage.
When Matthew Perry was a teenager he used to dream (as many do) of being famous. He would be walking down the red carpet on the way to a glitzy movie premiere, ultra-cool in a razor-sharp suit and shades with a beautiful woman on his arm, and the crowds would be chanting his name.
As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for because it may come true. In Perry’s case it certainly did. His is the kind of fame that prohibits a trip to the corner shop unless you want a paparazzo recording the event, the kind that generates front-page headlines if you have a minor prang in your Porsche, and most certainly, if anything major goes wrong in your life - in his case a battle with drug addiction and alcoholism - you can expect to read about it on a daily basis in the tabloids. Because Perry, as everyone knows, is one of the six stars of Friends, the most successful sitcom in the world. He joined the show, some nine years ago, as an unknown, still thirsting for that fame, and he knew instantly that it was about to come his way. What he didn’t know was what it would cost. “We were six actors struggling to get work,” he recalls. “We had done other shows that had failed, and I knew something interesting was going on because it was so good on the page and the characters were wonderful. I was the one who was saying, ‘Get ready everybody, your lives are going to change here.’ Not knowing at all how or what would happen.”

And what the writers did, very cleverly, was take that group of beautiful girls - Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow - and handsome guys - Perry, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer and build the characters as exaggerated versions of the actors’ personalities. So Cox, as Monica, is obsessively tidy, Schwimmer, as Ross, is a bit of a dork, and Perry, as Chandler, at least at first was the guy who couldn’t get a girl, the joker, who masked his vulnerability behind devastating one-liners.”They’re smart people,” Perry says of Friends’ team of writers. “They took us out to lunch separately and said, ‘How are you? Who are you? Tell us some things about yourself.’ One of the things I said at the time was that I felt that I wasn’t an unattractive guy, but I never did good with women, and it was like, whooosh! Seventy-five stories about that came out of it. And I also said that I used to deflect a lot of serious things in my life with jokes and humour and that ended up being in there, too.”

Friends has brought each of the cast enormous wealth and opportunity - all have done movies and numerous guest appearances in other high-profile shows. For Perry, there have been films such as The Whole Nine Yards, a role in The West Wing and now the chance to appear on the West End stage in David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, alongside his own real best friend, Hank Azaria, and Minnie Driver. as curtain-time draws near, he feels a growing sense of anticipation mixed with fear. He hasn’t been on stage since he was at high school. “I am nervous, but the fact that I am means that I belong there. I’m nervous because I’m going to be away from home for three months, performing in a 900-seat house, eight shows a week. I’ve been doing Friends in front of a live audience for almost ten years and we always say it’s like doing a different one-act play every week. But you know if you screw up, they cut the camera and you start again. You can’t go to the West End of London and do a half-assed job and be able to get away with it.”

At this point in his life, Perry is less of the joker and more the realist. When we meet, at his publicist’s office in Beverly Hills, he turns up bang on time and offers to rustle up some coffee. He looks the picture of healthy Californian living - that morning he was up early playing tennis, as he does each day and his features and frame are neither gaunt nor podgy as they have been in the past when his weight fluctuated wildly as his body tried to cope with drug and booze binges - he was was hooked on the painkiller Vicodin, first prescribed after a jet ski accident, and vodka was his drink of choice.

For four years there were stories of his addictions and well-publicised spells in rehab clinics from which he would emerge having claimed to have cleaned up. But it wasn’t really true. Then, two years ago as he neared the end of filming Serving Sara, a comedy with Elizabeth Hurley, he realised that if he didn’t get help he would almost certainly end up killing himself. With just 13 days left of shooting, Perry phoned both of his parents from a Dallas hotel room - his father, the actor John Bennett Perry, and his mother, Suzanne Morrison, divorced when he was just two years old - and they organised a flight out of the city, picked him up at Los Angeles, and took him to a clinic. “I’d like to take credit and say that it was a brave move, but it was a kind of life or death situation. I’m quite a professional man when it comes to obligations, but they had to take a distant second to survival basically. That was a little over two years ago. I know the exact date of course.”

Perry’s tailspin began when he should, on paper, have been at his happiest. His instincts were certainly right about Friends: it was a hit from it’s first season and just got bigger. And at first the fame it brought him was just what he’d always wanted. “There was a part of that I loved,” he says. “I’d wanted that attention and that kind of fame my whole life, and I had about eight months when it was like a dream come true. You know, I get the best seats in restaurants and I get to do the kind of work I want to do, I’m on the covers of magazines, people recognise me wherever I go…”

Try and pin down exactly where this comes from and it seems that it’s a mixture of hero-worshipping his father and loving that feeling he got when he made the other kids laugh at school. After his parents divorced, his mother returned to her native Canada where she worked as a press secretary to former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Perry and only child, went with her. “I was about six when I learnt that I loved the feeling of making people laugh. something that I’d said is making them laugh and have a good time. It just feeds my brain and gets my endorphins up.”

At school in Ottawa, Perry was a talented tennis player and he also loved performing in school plays. On holidays to visit his father in Los Angeles he would get to visit television sets and see dad at work. “It’s certainly why I’m an actor, I guess to a certain extent you always want to follow in your father’s footsteps. and when I was about 15, 16, I moved down to Los Angeles to live with him.”

Throughout his late teens and early twenties, Perry found work with small roles in films and on numerous television projects, most of which rarely got beyond the pilot.

He first met Azaria - his co-star in Sexual Perversity in Chicago - in 1986. “We did a pilot called Morning Maggie with Ellen Green who was in Little Shop of Horrors, and it was just truly dreadful, but the good thing that came of it was meeting Hank and our friendship.”

And then came Friends. It’s hard to over-emphasise just how iconic this show has become in America. Like Cheerswhich went before it, it’s a national obsession. For the six young men and women involved life was never the same again. But once that first infatuation with fame wore off, Perry began to get lost in it all and to seek the high he found in performance off camera with drink and Vicodin. He looks back now on that 25-year-old new to it all, and can see that he was spinning out of control. “What you realise is that all your dreams coming true when you are 25 is not necessarily the best thing in the world. You say to yourself, ‘If I’d written down all the things I’d wanted as a 15-year-old, I have it all now. But it’s not as fulfilling as I’d hoped.’”

When Perry emerged from rehab, taking his newfound sobriety day by day, as he still does, he went back to work - he finished Serving Sara and returned to Friends, and, to his credit, he hasn’t shied away from talking about his problems, because he feels that it may help other addicts. “Part of the ins and outs and the ups and downs of being famous is this: most people who deal with alcoholism and addiction get to do it anonymously, I was on the cover of People magazine having to do it. So why be completely quiet about it? For better or worse, I’m a guy that people can relate to. I don’t have that Indiana Jones kind of hero guy image about me.”

He’s also learnt to focus on work. Instead of turning up with a hangover (”I never drank during the day, it was always at night, but I would feel pretty rough in the mornings”), he’s there bright and early and raring to go. Perhaps he’s filling his life with work to help him stay sober, but if he is, it’s doing the trick. The day before we met he’d done a 17-hour stint on The West Wing, playing a Republican lawyer. His attitude to acting had changed, too. Whereas at first it was a vehicle for stardom, now he talks of branching out - appearing in the West End is part of that - and taking on more dramatic roles when Friends finally ends next year. “It’s difficult to explain why I love acting,” he says. “But I do know that if I wasn’t paid to do it I would still have to. I would be in some dinner theatre in Detroit or somewhere doing some play. For me, it started with wanting to be famous, but then it became a type of expression that I’m addicted to in a way. I can’t describe the feeling, but after 230 episodes of Friends or something ridiculous like that I still get nervous before the show.”

Perry and his colleagues are all paid $1 million for each episode of Friends. Over the years, their contract negotiations have created headlines themselves as the salaries went up and up each season. Rather cannily, from very early on they bargained as a group and always said that if one left it was over.

The money is, of course fabulous - the last season will be 18 episodes and it doesn’t take a genious to work out that Perry is a very wealthy young man. He refuses to beat himself up about it. “I was naive enough to think that making a lot of money would make me happier. It’s not true. It’s almost a mantra with me, but I really believe that if you are not happy with what you have you won’t be happy with what you get. The weekly salary to me is like a punchline, it’s insane, you sit under your blanket at night and laugh about it. It’s like hitting the lottery but knowing you can back it up.”

The end, when it comes some time next January, will herald a mixture of emotions for all of them. “That will definitely be the end,” he says. “It’s going to be a big deal. I started that show when I was 24 and I’ll finish when when I’m 34, so there’s a symmetry to it. But those are pretty important years in a man’s life, so it will be an emotional time. Friends has been a huge safely net in a way, because if a movie doesn’t work we can go back to it. But it’s time to move on. and I like to think that when that door shuts another one will open.”

He’s already opening those other doors. He’s made films during time off from Friends - Three to Tango, Fools Rush In, Almost Heroes and recently completed the sequel The Whole Ten Yards. Now he wants to branch out and do more dramatic roles. “I want to be more involved in developing things. There will be times to do more movies, possibly directing and maybe writing. I’ve written a couple of things and would like to do more. And maybe all of that will take a distant second to getting married and having a kid. You can’t beat that part of life.”

There have been high profile romances in the past - a brief fling with Julia Roberts after she did a guest spot on Friends, Heather Graham, George Clooney’s ex Krista Allen and at the moment he’s dating Rachel Dunn, a beautiful young woman who is not, apparently, an actress. “I don’t really want to talk about it, but it’s a relationship that I’m in and it’s terrific,” is all he will say about her.

His attitude to women has changed over the years,as he’s matured. He’s been reflecting on that rather a lot lately, since re-reading Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, a dark comedy, written in 1974, of sexual politics (About Last Night, the film adaption, was released in 1986 starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore). Perry will play Danny who, along with his cynical best friend Bernie (Azaria), is looking to get laid and instead falls in love with Debbie (Kelly Reilly). Her friend, Joan (Minnie Driver), is almost as distrusting of men as Bernie is cynical about women. Played out in bars, libraries and on beaches, it’s bitingly funny, with superb Mamet dialougue throughout. Perry is looking forward to the challenge. “I’d read it a long time ago, because I’m a huge Mamet fan. But I didn’t recall the intensity of the language. I was also surprised at the tragedy in the play and where it ends up going; nobody dies, but my character is a closed off, jerky guy who has his heart opened by meeting Debbie and falling in love, and all the time he has that guy, Bernie, talking in his ear, and it’s whether he falls prey to that voice. I was amazed at how it made me feel.

“My attitude to women has changed. I think if you are the same guy at 30 as you were at 20 then something is wrong. Hopefully we all learn. In my life I’ve kind of gone out of my way to crush my own ego a little and try to let people in and listen more. And I’ve been able to develop friendships with women. I wasn’t always like that. I used to see the situation as, ‘Wow, maybe I can have a relationship with her’, or, ‘Maybe we can have a one-night stand’. Tha’ts changed a lot as I’ve got older.”

As, of course, have many things. Matthew Perry, now that he has fame, no longer has to wonder what it would be like. “The people who really fall in to trouble are the ones who buy into it and feel that they should be treated differently. Part of the changes that I’ve made in the past few years have helped me get a good sense of that and realise that it’s much better to be kind of in the middle if the crowd and just be myself.”