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As Chandler Bing on the iconic television sitcom Friends, the late Matthew Perry possessed a unique combination of charm and vulnerability. He was quick-witted – aside from co-star Lisa Kudrow, he was easily the razor-sharpest of the show’s six stars – but in his delivery he had a brittle quality. Chandler Bing, like Matthew Perry, wore his sensitivity on his sleeve.
There was an enigmatic ridiculousness to Chandler’s persona. He worked in the indecipherable field of statistical analysis and data reconfiguration. His father Charles transitioned into the cabaret star Helena Handbasket. His parents divorced over Thanksgiving dinner, leaving him haunted by the holiday season. He met every moment with wide-eyed, darkly comical horror.
But what gave Chandler Bing real life was Perry’s extraordinary presence. And a smile that beamed from cheek to cheek, which came with an added twinkle in his eyes. When Perry looked at you, he really saw you. His gaze was intense but almost unguarded. Unlike many stars, who meet the spotlight head on, Perry, like Chandler, was always a little ill at ease.
It is a truism in comedy – television sitcom, in particular – that the line between actor and character is often blurred. It is not a great mystery, it is a byproduct of the brutality of high-turnover cultural commerce. There is little time for nuance in the business of weekly TV, so in many ways the writers’ room depends on the show casting actors who, more or less, are the characters they are going to play.
Which is not to say that Perry and Chandler Bing were one and the same. Rather, in Chandler’s most vulnerable moments, and in the moments when television comedy strays into dark emotion, Perry’s own sensitivities were never far from the surface. The pace of the show depended on that. And Perry, with a greater dramatic range than a sitcom ever really tapped, always hit his mark.
I met Perry several times: on the set of Friends in the mid-1990s, at the height of its popularity, and years later, when he was promoting the reboot of The Odd Couple in 2015. In some respects, the two Matthew Perrys were wholly different. On the set of Friends, he was playful and charming, barely an adult. Being interviewed for The Odd Couple two decades later, he was guarded, bruised by the bumpy road of fame that had followed.
Matthew Perry.Credit: Gino Domenico for AP
At the same time, the two men were not so different. Both were candid. And even as an older man, Perry did not seem to lose the qualities of his younger self, the smile, the twinkle in the eye; uncertain about what the spotlight expected of him, but willing to have an honest conversation. And he was no less funny at 45 than he was at 25.
Even in the last few years of his life – when his addiction and health issues were more widely known, and tackled with great candour in his autobiography Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir – his humour was always on display. An unwillingness to take himself too seriously, and an unwillingness to take the burden of fame too seriously, either.
On the cultural landscape, there sit few great generational comedies. I Love Lucy is one. For the generation that came after that, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is another. For an audience of a certain age, Friends is a third. A culturally definitive comedy that gave every group of schoolmates, roommates or work colleagues who watched familiar roles to play, and punchlines and moments to hang onto.
The cast of Friends.Credit: Kevork Djansezian for AP
In that sense, Chandler Bing was everyone’s roommate or co-worker, a big brother to some, and an imaginary boyfriend to others. It is a reflection of both the power of popular culture in a media-saturated world, and also the uniquely intimate properties of television, which brings fictional universes into our homes and hearts every day.
For that reason, Perry’s death cuts deep. It momentarily silences the laughter. And it momentarily takes us into feelings of grief and loss. It seems almost absurd to feel so deeply the loss of a fictional character as much as the man who played him. But that is the oddness of television too; it creates inexplicable connections between the real and the imaginary.
The world of Friends endures as a byproduct of another one of television’s quirks: the rerun. A total of 236 half-hour episodes, across 10 seasons. Wherever you go, whenever you switch on a TV, a local channel will be playing an episode. Streaming platforms will offer it on demand. The more fastidious will keep the DVDs on their shelves.
The way they were … the cast of Friends in a publicity still for the series.Credit: Warner Bros Television
What we find there is an extraordinary tapestry of great characters, beautifully written moments and nuances of performance that have turned Chandler, Phoebe, Ross, Monica, Joey and Rachel into mononyms. Like Oprah and Madonna, they are people – admittedly made-up ones – who endure in our conversations with a singular name.
And within the rectangular frame of the television screen, Matthew Perry will endure, gifted a strange kind of immortality. Rendered in pixels, and replaying much-loved moments from our shared cultural memory, we may have lost the flesh-and-blood man, but his absurd and delightful alter ego, the uncertain duplicate that is Chandler Bing, will live forever.
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