Matthew Perry‘s story should have been one about finding great success, then struggling with the demons of addiction only to win and live to tell about it. Unfortunately, due to a terrible tragedy, he didn’t get to live as long as he should have after getting sober.
Perhaps most upsetting? He didn’t live long enough to find the one and settle down. But not for lack of trying! Matthew dated some amazing women throughout his life, quite an extraordinary list, as we’re sure you’ll agree.
Jennifer Aniston… was not one of them.
When he was spilling his guts in his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, he admitted the sad truth he’d had a huge crush on his co-star since two years BEFORE Friends even began!
Once, after getting a huge confidence boost from booking two jobs in one day, he called her up, telling her, “You’re the first person I wanted to tell this to!” He wrote in his book about how he went on to ask her out:
“Bad idea — I could feel ice forming through the phone. Looking back, it was clear that this made her think I liked her too much, or in the wrong kind of way… and I only compounded the error by then asking her out. She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, ‘We can’t be friends!’”
Ha! That’s really funny, considering where fate would take them!
He told the story a few times during that book tour — how awkward filming was as he had to try to tamp down his adoration:
“Fairly early in the making of Friends I realized that I was still crushing badly on Jennifer Aniston. Our hellos and goodbyes became awkward. And then I’d ask myself, How long can I look at her? Is three seconds too long?”
Oh no…
He also said:
“At first it was like, she would walk in, I’d be like, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ And then I’d go to my dressing room and just go, ‘Oh, I’ll never be able to be with her.’ But how can you not have a crush on Jennifer Aniston, you know? But I did at one point just go, ‘All right, that’s enough.’”
That time? When a fellow named Brad Pitt entered the picture!
He wrote later in his book:
“I had long since gotten over her — ever since she started dating Pitt, I was fine. And had worked out exactly how long to look at her without it being awkward.”
In another interview he explained it was a little easier to kill all hope when she became betrothed to such a golden screen god:
“She married Brad Pitt, and I was like, ‘I don’t think I have a chance here.’”
Ha! Matthew Perry was a catch — but who amongst us can compare to Brad??
It may have been in a depressingly platonic way for Perry, but Jen did love him. A source told DailyMail.com after his passing:
“Nobody shed more tears for Matthew during the darkest points of his struggles with addiction than Jennifer.”
And another source told Page Six the Morning Show star was “struggling” even more than any other of his co-stars to recover from the news of his passing. How heartbreaking…
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