Celebrity

Jennie Garth Says Late Co-Stars Luke Perry and Shannen Doherty Are ‘Still Alive’ in Her Mind

The Beverly Hills, 90210 stars passed away in 2019 and 2024.

Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for The American Heart Association

Jennie Garth still can’t wrap her head around the deaths of Beverly Hills, 90210 co-stars Luke Perry and Shannen Doherty.

Garth, 52, opened up about the loss of Perry, who passed away at 52 in March 2019 after suffering a massive stroke, and Doherty, who died last year at 53 following a lengthy battle with cancer, on the Two Jersey Js podcast on Wednesday, March 26.

“It doesn’t make sense. It still doesn’t make sense to my brain,” Garth said of her former co-stars’ deaths. “I live in a world where they still are alive in my mind, so it’s very hard to understand that they’re not here physically.”

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Garth has been open about the impact her co-stars’ deaths have had on her, telling Tori Spelling on their 90210MG podcast in July 2024 that she had been feeling “very fearful” while processing the loss.

“It made me feel very fearful, especially just with Luke dying and now Shannen,” Garth explained. “I just feel like, I don’t know, it could be any of us [that] could go at any moment. That kind of feeling … yeah, that’s scary.”

“It’s like a piece of your foundation that [is gone],” Garth added of Perry. “No one will ever really understand unless they were there with us then [and] they went through the experience with us.”

(Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images)

Garth explained that when it came to Doherty’s passing, she was still in shock, despite her co-star fighting cancer on and off since 2015. “It’s crazy that we could be shocked knowing that she was sick and knowing how hard she was fighting, but it still felt shocking,” she said, adding that because Doherty was such a “fighter,” she never thought the cancer would ultimately kill her.

“It was just shocking and makes you pissed, mad, sad, all the feelings because and then [you’re] like, ‘What the f—?’” Garth said. “Because she’s the one person that you didn’t see this happening [to].”