Matthew Perry revealed crushing on Jennifer Aniston before and during “Friends,” but he got turned down.
In his memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing“, the actor shared that he met Aniston before they started filming the hit series. He admitted being “immediately taken” by her. He recalled a moment when he called her up and shared news that he booked two acting roles. He wrote, “It was clear that this made her think I liked her too much, or in the wrong kind of way.”
It didn’t stop him from pursuing the actress. According to him, she declined his offer and said they should just be friends, but he told her, “[We] can’t be friends!”
They had their first table read in 1994 and though he still had feelings for her, they “were able to sail right past the past and focus on the fact that we had both gotten the best job Hollywood had to offer.”
Perry couldn’t move on right away because his feeling for Aniston grew while filming “Friends.” However, his feeling went away with the success of the sitcom and her continued “deafening lack of interest.” They did have their first onscreen kiss on Season 3, during the episode, “The One with the Flashback.”
The actor also revealed that when Aniston and Brad Pitt started dating in 1998, he had “long since gotten over her” and learned to interact with her “without it being awkward.”
The 53-year-old actor also had other romantic relationships, specifically with Julia Roberts in 1995. The two dated for a while but he eventually broke up with her after two months. According to him, he was “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. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts,” he wrote.
Perry also talked about his battle with drug and alcohol addiction in his memoir. He went to rehab twice while filming Friends from 1994-2004. He portrayed Chandler Bing who got married to Courteney Cox’s character, Monica Geller. After filming their “wedding,” he revealed he was “driven back to the treatment center … in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”
The actor also confessed spending around $9 million throughout his sobriety journey. He also had a near-death experience after his colon burst.
