Matthew Perry, the comic genius who wore his big, bruised heart on his sleeve

The ‘Friends’ star’s performances were a masterclass in comic timing. And in his life outside of Chandler Bing, he was disarmingly honest about his frailties and his struggles with addiction. Fiona Sturges pays tribute

Matthew Perry, a year after ‘Friends’ began, in 1995 (Dave Lewis/Shutterstock)

When Matthew Perry was a teenager in Ottawa, Canada, he developed a dryly sarcastic manner of talking that was a big hit with his friends. At high school, he had discovered that he could use humour to get people’s attention – and attention and validation were what he craved. Muttering behind the back of a particularly belligerent teacher, he would say, “Could he be any meaner?”, to hoots of laughter.

Ten years later, reading the early scripts for Friends, a series about a group of twentysomething New Yorkers who lived in and out of each other’s apartments, Perry found a kindred spirit in the character of Chandler Bing, who used humour to send up his own insecurities and whose sarcastic one-liners – “Could she be more out of my league?” – would become his trademark.

During the casting process, David Crane and Marta Kauffman, the creators of Friends, had been struggling to find their Chandler, and were worried they might have to rewrite him. But when Perry auditioned, Crane would later recall, “We just looked at each other and went, ‘Oh my God, so the writing doesn’t suck. We just hadn’t found the guy yet ... Matthew came in and you went, ‘Oh well, there you go. Done, done. That’s the guy.’”