\n<\/p>\n
A confession: When I received a news alert that the actor Matthew Perry had died, my mind adopted the particular cadence that Perry perfected as Chandler Bing, the character he played for 10 seasons on the NBC sitcom \u201cFriends.\u201d Here is what I thought, \u201cCould this be<\/em> any sadder?\u201d<\/p>\n Perry, 54, died<\/a> nearly a year after the publication of \u201cFriends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,\u201d<\/a> an unusually candid memoir of addiction and recovery. As he detailed in that book, he spent many of the best years of his career oblivious, avoidant, numb \u2014 conditions that don\u2019t typically encourage great acting. But he was great. And it had seemed reasonable, if rose-colored, to hope that sobriety might make him better, returning him to the nervy, instinctive brilliance of his peak years. That hope is now foreclosed.<\/p>\n A professional actor since his teens, Perry had appeared in more than a dozen sitcoms before landing \u201cFriends\u201d in 1994. I first remember seeing him years earlier, on an episode of \u201cGrowing Pains\u201d screened by my school during a special assembly meant to advertise the dangers of drunken driving. Mostly it advertised Perry and his anxious, reckless charm.<\/p>\n To say that he never did anything quite as good as \u201cFriends,\u201d before or after, is not to diminish his achievement. Even among the irrepressible talents of his co-stars, Perry stood out, for a rubbery, heedless way with physical comedy and a split-second timing that most stopwatches would envy. If you have seen more than a few episodes of the show \u2014 and many, many millions have, including fans born years after its initial airing<\/a> \u2014 you will have absorbed Chandler\u2019s rhythms, his catchphrases, the way Perry\u2019s handsome, moony face would stretch like spandex, the better to sell a reaction. He had both an absolute commitment to what a line required and a way of gently ironizing that line. His character was the butt of jokes. Perry was in on those same jokes. There was a boyishness to him that seemed to excuse his characters\u2019 worst behavior, on \u201cFriends\u201d and in subsequent roles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Those roles never served him as well and the shows he attached himself to rarely survived to a second season. His co-stars found other movies and series to showcase their talents. Perry\u2019s latter projects, despite fine work on \u201cStudio 60 on the Sunset Strip\u201d and \u201cThe Good Wife,\u201d were largely grim, forgettable. It can be hard for boys to grow up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It seems to have been hard for Perry. \u201cI wanted to be famous so badly,\u201d he told The New York Times in 2002<\/a>. \u201cYou want the attention, you want the bucks, and you want the best seat in the restaurant. I didn\u2019t think what the repercussions would be.\u201d Those repercussions included the enabling of his addictions and the loss of any anonymity. (It had the occasional upside, too. In his memoir, he wrote that after a reaction to an anesthetic stopped his heart, a worker in the hospital in Switzerland performed CPR for five full minutes to restore rhythm. \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t been on \u2018Friends,\u2019 would he have stopped at three minutes?\u201d he wondered, darkly.)<\/p>\n His struggles were an open secret, then they weren\u2019t even a secret. (He was speaking openly, if optimistically, as early as 2002<\/a>.) And it\u2019s a miracle, really, that he could perform as he did, in and out of rehab, even as various cast members confronted him about his alcohol use. He seems to have fictionalized some aspects of this in \u201cThe End of Longing,\u201d a play he wrote and starred in. While the Times critic was cool on the drama, he wrote that Perry was \u201cgenuinely scary<\/a> as a jalopy of a man running on ethanol.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking to The Times last year, Perry treated his hard-won sobriety as serious and tenuous. \u201cIt\u2019s still a day-to-day process<\/a> of getting better,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery day.\u201d Onscreen he could disguise that struggle. This was the genius of \u201cFriends\u201d and the genius of Perry, to make it all look easy<\/a>. \u201cFriends\u201d was always a fantasy, a whitewashed vision of urban life, in which the characters had apartments with the approximate footprint of palazzos and infinite leisure time. (What was Chandler\u2019s job anyway? Why did he so rarely go there?) But to watch it, as I did late Saturday night, for hours, was to relax into the confidence of its comedy, of Perry\u2019s excitable charm. Onscreen, in that fountain<\/a>, in some horrible, short-sleeved cardigan, he is there for us, still.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n