Matthew Perry would still have merited TV immortality if he’d never appeared in anything after Friends: 99.9% of actors spend their careers failing to land a role like Chandler Bing. Just as James Gandolfini can be remembered as a great dramatic actor on the strength of Tony Soprano alone, the brilliance of Perry – who died this week aged 54 – is all there in Chandler. Perry understood how to make the funny lines funnier and the so-so lines funny enough, doing his job so well that he created a particular sense of humour that spread way beyond the show itself. It’s just obvious when someone you know is a Chandler, or when you make a Chandler joke yourself: such definitive TV roles are exceptionally rare.
The rest of the cast of Friends have, understandably, struggled to match their biggest success, perhaps because for them, their Friends character isn’t a basis for more interesting later roles. There isn’t a lot left to explore in Joey, Ross or Monica. But a man who is funny all the time, who is funny when he knows he ought to be serious, who is always on alert, waiting for the people around them to do or say something that he can turn into a joke? Even in a show as peppy and smooth as Friends, there was always an implied darkness there below the surface, and despite his personal problems meaning he was the least prolific of the Friends cast in his solo career, Perry’s willingness to walk into those shadows makes his post-Friends catalogue the most interesting of them all. In flashes, it might even be his best work.
