Anyone who has ever seen Gravity or Out of Sight immediately understands that the true secret to George Clooney’s long reign as Hollywood’s leading man is that he possesses the loneliest voice in American cinema. Beneath the twinkling eyes and quick mischief and the playful quips lies a natural melancholy in every utterance.
It was a quality less obviously shared by Matthew Perry, the late, lamented funny man. Perry was just 54 when he was found face down in his own hot tub last October, having finally lost a savage battle with alcohol and prescription drugs. This week, five people, including his personal assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa; and Dr Salvador Plasencia, a physician who supplied the actor with the ketamine vials and lozenges that ultimately killed him, were charged in connection with his death.
Slowly, an account of Perry’s fragmenting last days has been pieced together. It’s a desperate tale. On the day of his death, he had taken his first ketamine injection at 8.30am and then watched a film. Later he asked Iwamasa to get the hot tub ready and asked for another ketamine hit, telling his assistant: “Shoot me up with a big one.”
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Court papers showed that Plasencia at one stage texted a friend, Dr Mark Chavez, who has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine: “I wonder how much this moron will pay.”
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Perry had the financial means to feed his drug dependency. The extraordinary lengths he took to sate his addictions were outlined in Friends, Lovers and The Terrible Thing, the acerbic and harrowing memoir he found the clarity to write in recent years. It was published in late 2022. By then, Perry’s physical deterioration had shocked millions of fans when he appeared with his co-stars for a Friends reunion show the previous year.
The popularity of the show was not diluted by the fact that its last episode was broadcast in 2004. It stands as one of the touchstones of the 1990s and, more specifically, of pre-9/11 New York. And its global popularity left Perry and his co-stars in the strange netherworld where they could never quite shake off their alter egos. Perry had great comedic range but his portrayal of Chandler Bing, the nervy, sarcastic wisecracker of the group, meant it was difficult for the public to fully imagine him as anyone else.
The weirdness of that predicament, the unaccountable wealth, the pressures of fame and his descent into an opioid and prescription-drugs nightmare are all laid out in raw, unfiltered detail in his book. The reality is about as far from the cosy security of the Friends apartment as is imaginable. And it was during his promotional interviews that the power of Perry’s voice and tone hinted at a much broader range and potential than the wild success of Friends had permitted him. He was heartbroken from the beginning. He chased conventional stardom, got it and found that it answered nothing
“I had the American dream happen to me,” he said in an interview in 2022. “I got the great job, I was good at it. I bought a house. The house had a pool ... you know, I had the American dream. And I really, really liked it. Loved it for about six months. And then I walked into the house and went, aw man. This is not fixing this problem that I have. It doesn’t solve the problem.”
Perry said the reason for the success of his book and why “it was taken into the hearts of so many people is because everyone is starting to know or have addiction in their life. People have a brother or sister or grandfather or a close friend who has addiction in their life and they need to know from the addict’s point of view, in this case, me, how horrible it is. They are not weak. We are not weak. I am a pretty strong, resilient guy but it has nothing to do with weakness. It’s a disease we have, and we don’t know we have it.”
The US National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics has reams of figures that bear witness to this. Almost 10 million Americans aged 12 and over misuse opioids at least once in a year. Of those, 2.7 million have an opioid disorder. Perry was one of 107,543 Americans who died from a drug overdose in 2023.
Because he was who he was, his death was greeted with an enormous outpouring of public emotion and sorrow. His book promotional appearances, when he was back on television screens, battered but still warm and self-deprecating and whip-smart, had convinced fans that if he was back on the screen, then he must be okay. But it was just a brief hiatus, a coming up for air from what was, in retrospect, an appalling existence in a gilded cage. Apart from everything else, US society lost someone who might have become a powerful advocate for drugs education.
Perry was a 1970s kid, of the generation who dived into alcohol and substance escapism with no real clue as to the consequences. In one passage of his book, he recalled his brief friendship with River Phoenix, the brilliant young actor who died from a narcotics overdose outside a nightclub close to where Perry was living in 1993:
“I heard the screaming from my apartment, went back to bed, woke up to the news. After his passing, his mom wrote, in reference to drug use, ‘the spirits of [River’s] generation are being worn down’, and by then, I was drinking every night. But it would be years before I understood what exactly she meant.”