Actress Lauren Graham is reflecting on her meaningful friendship with the late, great Matthew Perry.
During the question and answer portion of her Have I Told You This Already? book tour on Friday, April 5, Graham told the audience that it's "still really hard to believe" that the Friends star passed away in 2023.
“While he was not technically ever a boyfriend, he was an almost in my life,” Graham told the audience, adding that Perry was also “a friend and a constant.”
“We would stretch for a year, then he would come back in my life, and he had just come back in my life last year,” she added.
Prior to the actor's death, Graham said he gave her “a pickleball set” for her birthday—the last gift she received from Perry before he died.
“He’s like really into tennis and pickleball," Graham told the audience, still discussing her dear friend in the present tense. She added that Perry also included a card that said: "Be older."
Perry passed away at his home in Los Angeles on Oct. 28, 2023. According to an autopsy report, the actor died as a result of "acute effects of ketamine," as reported by The New York Times. The same report found that "drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of an opioid" also contributed to his death.
In the wake of his passing, fans, celebrities, and those who had worked with Perry all shared moving tributes in honor of the late actor, including the entire living cast of Friends.
"Matthew. It is with a heavy heart I say goodbye. The times we had together are honestly among the favorite times of my life," co-star Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey Tribbiani to Perry’s Chandler Bing's, wrote. "It was an honor to share the stage with you and to call you my friend. I will always smile when I think of you and I’ll never forget you. Never. Spread your wings and fly brother you’re finally free. Much love. And I guess you’re keeping the 20 bucks you owe me.”
“I am grateful for every moment I had with you Matty and I miss you every day,” Courteney Cox, who played Monica Geller, wrote on Instagram. “When you work with someone as closely as I did with Matthew, there are thousands of moments I wish I could share. For now here’s one of my favorites. To give a little backstory, Chandler and Monica were supposed to have a one night fling in London. But because of the audience’s reaction, it became the beginning of their love story.”
"Oh boy this one has cut deep," Jennifer Aniston, who played Rachel Green, wrote on Instagram. "Having to say goodbye to our Matty has been an intense wave of emotions that I've never experienced before. We all experience loss at some point in our lives. Loss of life or loss of love. Being able to really SIT in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep.
"And we loved him deeply," Aniston continued. "He was such a part of our DNA. We were always the 6 of us. This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be."
According to reporting from Page Six, Aniston was “struggling” after Perry's unexpected death, and that the loss has “completely knocked her off her feet.
”Out of the remaining five, Jen and Courteney are reeling the most, and Jen is probably the one who is struggling most acutely," a source told the outlet at the time.
During an appearance on CBS Mornings one month after Perry's death, Graham said that "no one made me laugh as hard" as Perry did.
"Just tears, streaming," she recalled at the time. "There was just such joy in being around him and being his friend.”
