The One About Matthew Perry on Netflix: Sad portrait of a much-loved actor who couldn’t love himself

When struggling actor Matthew Perry read the script for a new sitcom, Friends Like Us, he knew he was born to play the role of drily witted Chandler Bing – a character who used humour to paper over his spiritual emptiness. He was, recalled Perry, “a guy who sort of distracted everybody from how miserable he was all the time by being funny”. That was Chandler. It was also Perry – and when he auditioned for the show, now called Friends, the producers recognised it too.

“Where’s Chandler Bing?” recalls Warren Littlefield, then president of NBC Entertainment, in the new documentary, The One About Matthew Perry (Netflix from Tuesday). “And then Matthew Perry came into the room.”

The One About Matthew Perry is a decently made and well-intentioned three-part documentary about the actor’s lifelong struggles with addiction – something that Friends exacerbated and which ultimately led to his death, caused by the acute effects of ketamine in October 2023.

This is also the story of Friends, the sitcom which became so big it catapulted its six stars to global and everlasting fame. However, none of the other “friends” appear; neither do the show’s creators. Most of the testimony comes from Perry’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, and from the friends with whom the actor knocked around in LA before Chandler came knocking on his door.

The documentary is also arguably superfluous given that Perry grappled unflinchingly and movingly with his addictions in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. In that book he was frank that drugs and alcohol were how he tried to fill the void inside him. He had, as a young actor, hoped that fame would have the same effect but after a few years of Friends he recognised that, if anything, it compounded his misery – telling an interviewer that if 85 per cent of celebrity was fantastic, the remaining 15 per cent was unbearable.

The One About Matthew Perry doesn’t try to reinvent the celebrity documentary. The story is stitched together from archive footage and old interviews with Perry, who was always honest about his failings. The new interviews are with Mia Perry Bowick, who recalls her shock at reading in a supermarket tabloid that her beloved older sibling was going to rehab (white-faced, her family confirmed it was true), and those old pals with whom he would go on the town in his pre-Friends days of obscurity.

Perry’s drinking was severe even by show business standards, recalls Jonathan Lynn, who directed him in his 2000 Bruce Willis two-hander, The Whole Nine Yards. “If anything went wrong, he would immediately turn to alcohol and pills. There’d always been a few people that drank a bit too much. This was different.”

After Friends, it got worse, recalls Perry’s sister: “When Matthew was done with Friends, there was this vast expanse of space all of a sudden. It was, in ways, kind of freeing. In other ways, kind of scary.”

[ Matthew Perry: ‘There is a hell. Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there’Opens in new window ]

Perry had been in rehab when he filmed his big Friends wedding scene between Chandler and Monica. Mia Perry Bowick remembers how much the wedding had meant to him and talks about the platonic love he had shared with the rest of the Friends cast. But that wasn’t enough to save him in the end and, well-made though it is, The One About Matthew Perry is ultimately a saddening portrait of a talented actor who could conquer the world but could never find a way to love himself. What really comes across is his loneliness: he had the world at his feet but, in the end, there was nobody there for him at all.