Matthew Perry’s special bond with Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston

They were known as one of the most tight-knit casts on TV – but Matthew Perry had a particularly special relationship with one of his co-stars.

They were famously one of the most closely-knit casts on TV, but Matthew Perry had a particularly tight bond with his Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston.

The two actors were part of the six core stars of the beloved sitcom – along with David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, and Courteney Cox – who all shot to fame shortly after it premiered in 1994.

Perry, who was best known as Chandler, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles in an apparent drowning accident.

Perry was found dead on Saturday. Picture: David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images

Aniston played Rachel alongside Perry’s Chandler on Friends.

In his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry admitted he’d had a huge “crush” on Aniston when they first met, and had been gutted when she’d gently turned down his offer of a date.

But their friendship became much more significant as they embarked on the whirlwind fame journey that came with Friends, especially once Perry began what would become a decades-long struggle with addiction.

In an interview with US journalist Diane Sawyer last year, he admitted it was Aniston who had first confronted him about his problems while they were on a break from filming.

“We know you’re drinking,” she reportedly told her troubled co-star, who wrote that it was a “scary moment” – but proved that she was a true friend.

“I should have been the toast of the town, but I was in a dark room meeting with nothing but drug dealers and completely alone,” Perry said of his actions during the peak of his Friends fame in the early noughties.

He later wrote in the memoir that he’d thought he was doing a great job at hiding his drug and alcohol abuse, but he’d later realised they’d known he was struggling and were trying to protect him.

“[They] were understanding, and they were patient,” Perry said of his co-stars.

“It’s like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”

Perry praised his co-stars for looking after him. Picture: Everett Collection

Aniston sent fans wild with this Instagram post, showing the former cast hanging out together. Picture: Instagram

Perry also praised Aniston for maintaining her compassion toward him, even years after the show ended its decades-long run in 2004.

“She was the one who reached out the most,” Perry told Sawyer.

“You know, I’m really grateful to her for that.”

The cast’s deep friendship was on full display during the highly-emotional Friends TV reunion in 2021, when Perry choked up while explaining his love for his co-stars.

“The best way that I can describe it is after the show was over, at a party or any kind of social gathering, if one of us bumped into each other, that was it. That was the end of the night. You just sat with the person all night long and that was it,” he said.

“You apologised to the people you were with, but they had to understand you had met somebody special to you and you were going to talk to that person for the rest of the night. And that’s the way it worked.”

While his castmates got teary, nodding in agreement, he added: “It’s certainly the way it worked with all of us. It’s just the way it is.”

Aniston comforted him during the TV reunion in 2021.

Last year, the actor opened up to People magazine about how his addiction issues had just started to surface when he was cast on Friends at the age of 24, and that at its horrifying peak, he was taking 55 Vicodin a day and weighed only 58kgs.

“I could handle it, kind of. But by the time I was 34, I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble,” he admits. “But there were years that I was sober during that time. Season 9 was the year that I was sober the whole way through. And guess which season I got nominated for best actor? I was like, ‘That should tell me something.’”

However, he struggled to get on top of it for years.

“I didn’t know how to stop,” he said. “If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail,’ I’d start packing. I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”

However, Perry told the publication that he’d finally beaten his addictions in recent years.

“I’m a pretty healthy guy right now,” he told People.

“What I’m most surprised with is my resilience. The way that I can bounce back from all of this torture and awfulness.”

Originally published as Matthew Perry’s special bond with Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston