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Jennifer Aniston is remembering her Friends co-star and good friend Matthew Perry. During a recent Actors on Actors conversation with Reese Witherspoon for Variety, Aniston shared that she had been talking with Perry over text the day he died.
“As he said he’d love to be remembered. He was happy. He was healthy. He had quit smoking. He was getting in shape,” Aniston told Witherspoon. “He was happy — that’s all I know. I was literally texting with him that morning, funny Matty. He was not in pain. He wasn’t struggling. He was happy.”
Aniston said she wanted to emphasize that Perry was “getting health” right before he died, even though he “was dealt a tough one.” Perry died on Oct. 28 in an apparentdrowning at his Los Angeles home. Aniston and Perry starred on Friends as Rachel Green and Chandler Bing.
“I miss him dearly. We all do. Boy, he made us laugh really hard,” she said.
Aniston added that it was “so beautiful” to read the tributes written to Perry by both his colleagues and journalists alike. “I hope he can know that he was loved in a way he never thought he was,” she said.
“I also have to say I think Matthew Perry’s dialect, his way of speaking, created a whole different world,” she added. “We went with his lead, in a way. It just added something to our joy.”
Witherspoon — who now stars alongside Aniston on The Morning Show — also reflected on her own friendship with Perry, after joining Friends as a guest in Season Six.
“You all were so close. It’s incredible what was born of those friendships, and how you guys have always taken care of each other for years and years. It’s really beautiful and set standards for our business, as well, with the way you respected each other,” Witherspoon said. “I feel lucky that I got to be on that show and I walked in like Alice in Wonderland, watching the most popular cast do this whole thing.”
“I remember going home and going, oh, they’re in another league,” she continued. “They’re on another planet on comedy levels that I’ve never seen my entire life, pivoting on a dime and working on each other’s energy and it was extraordinary.”
Aniston shared an Instagram tribute to Perry a few weeks after his death, writing that saying goodbye to him was “an insane wave of emotions that I’ve never experienced before.”
“We loved him deeply. He was such a part of our DNA. We were always the 6 of us,” she wrote, referring to her Friends co-stars. “This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be.”
“For Matty, he KNEW he loved to make people laugh. As he said himself, if he didn’t hear the ‘laugh’ he thought he was going to die,” she added. “His life literally depended on it. And boy did he succeed in doing just that. He made all of us laugh. And laugh hard. In the last couple weeks, I’ve been pouring over our texts to one another. Laughing and crying then laughing again. I’ll keep them forever and ever.”
