Julia Roberts is opening up about the “heartbreaking” death of Matthew Perry. The Leave the World Behind actress, who briefly dated the Friends star in the ’90s, looked back on her time with Perry in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight following his death on Oct. 28 at the age of 54.
Reflecting on her experience guest starring on Friends as childhood classmate of Perry’s Chandler Bing in the 1996 episode “The One After the Super Bowl,” Roberts said she had “all good thoughts and feelings,” continuing, “They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of a one-off character and it was a really fun time.” Perry previously revealed in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, that he and Roberts had been in a “three-month-long courtship” at the time the episode was filmed. Roberts continued of her ex’s shocking death, “The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking.” She added, “I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
Perry shared the details of his short-lived romance with Roberts in his memoir, revealing he was the first to reach out when the Pretty Woman actress was considering her guest role on Friends. “I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read: ‘The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,’” he wrote in the book, adding, “Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive. I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived.”
Two months later, Perry wrote he was single, as the reality of dating such a big star was “too much” for him. “I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable,” he wrote, adding that instead of “facing the inevitable agony of losing her,” he was the one to break up with Roberts.
“She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her,” Perry said. “I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.”
