Matthew Perry’s ex Julia Roberts breaks her silence over his ‘heartbreaking’ death
Matthew Perry’s ex-girlfriend Julia Roberts has broken her silence over his death.
The Friends star was found dead, aged 54, of an apparent drowning in his spa in LA on October 28.
“The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking,” she told Entertainment Tonight.
“I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can.”
Roberts was Perry’s first high-profile girlfriend, with their romance beginning when he wrote her an entire paper on quantum physics to persuade her to sign on for an appearance on Friends.
“Thus began a three-month-long courtship by daily faxes,” he wrote of the time in his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
“This was pre-internet, pre-cell phones — all our exchanges were done by fax. And there were many; hundreds.
“She was the biggest movie star in the world, and I was on the No.1 show on TV.”
The actress told producers that if she was to make an appearance on the show she wanted to be a part of Perry’s storyline.
Roberts played Perry’s character Chandler’s childhood classmate Susie Moss.
Roberts went on to star alongside her boyfriend in the episode The One After the Superbowl, Part 2 in 1996.
“They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of, a one-off character and it was a really fun time,” she told Entertainment Tonight of Perry and his castmates.
“All good thoughts and feelings.”
Perry spoke highly of Roberts in his memoir, recalling “the way she strung sentences together, the way she saw the world, the way she articulated her unique thoughts, all was so captivating”.
However Perry broke up with the actress after his drug and alcohol addiction led him to believe he was “not enough” for her.
“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me,” he wrote.
“I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unloveable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
‘In a really good place’
According to Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman, the actor was “sober” and “in a really good place” when she spoke with him two weeks before his death in October 2023.
“He was happy and chipper. He didn’t seem weighed down by anything. He was in a really good place, which is why this seems so unfair,” she said on Today.
Following a game of pickleball the morning of October 28, Perry reportedly returned home and sent his assistant out on an errand.
When the assistant returned two hours later, Perry was unresponsive in the spa and emergency services were called.
The LA County Medical Examiner has “deferred” a pronouncement on Perry’s cause of death.
“In cases where the cause of death cannot be determined at the time of autopsy, a deferred certificate will be issued until additional studies have been completed,” the LA coroner’s guidelines state.
SOURCE: 7NEWS