Jennifer Aniston recalled having a sweet chat with Friends costar Matthew Perry just hours before his untimely death on October 28.
“He was happy,” Aniston, 54, told Variety on Monday, December 11, of her last texting exchange with Perry prior to his passing. “He was healthy. He had quit smoking. He was getting in shape. He was happy — that’s all I know.”
Aniston began to cry as she remembered her last moments with Perry, who died in October at the age of 54 after being found unresponsive in a jacuzzi. His cause of death has yet to be determined.
“I was literally texting with him that morning, funny Matty,” she said. “He was not in pain. He wasn’t struggling. He was happy.”
The Friends star played Rachel Green alongside Perry as Chandler Bing for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004. “We are all so utterly devastated by the loss of Matthew. We were more than just cast mates. We are a family,” Aniston said in a joint statement to Us Weekly in October along with her remaining Friends costars, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer. “There is so much to say, but right now we’re going to take a moment to grieve and process this unfathomable loss.”
Two weeks later, Aniston revealed via Instagram that it “cut deep” losing Perry. “Having to say goodbye to our Matty has been an insane wave of emotions that I’ve never experienced before,” she explained on November 15. “We loved him deeply. He was such a part of our DNA. We were always the 6 of us. This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be.”
She added: “For Matty, he KNEW he loved to make people laugh. As he said himself, if he didn’t hear the ‘laugh’ he thought he was going to die. His life literally depended on it. And boy did he succeed in doing just that. He made all of us laugh. And laugh hard. In the last couple weeks, I’ve been pouring over our texts to one another. Laughing and crying then laughing again. I’ll keep them forever and ever.”
While Perry was vocal over the years about his struggles with addiction, Aniston was adamant on Monday that he had turned a corner.
“I want people to know he was really healthy, and getting healthy. He was on a pursuit. He worked so hard,” she told Variety on Monday. “He really was dealt a tough one. I miss him dearly. We all do. Boy, he made us laugh really hard.”
Aniston added that she hopes Perry is remembered “as he said he’d love to be remembered,” which was as a man who lived to help others.
After battling addiction, Perry turned his Malibu home into a sober living facility called the Perry House from 2013 to 2015. He was also a spokesperson for the nonprofit National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP), working to help criminal justice reform.
Last month, The Matthew Perry Foundation was created in honor of the late actor’s efforts to help people get through addiction. Aniston showed support for the organization on Giving Tuesday in November, asking her followers to “please join me and Matty’s family in supporting his foundation.”
She noted via her Instagram Story at the time that “he would have been grateful for all the love.”
Looking back at all the outpouring of love since that sad October day, Aniston told Variety, “It’s so beautiful” to see how much Perry touched his fans. “I hope he can know that he was loved in a way he never thought he was,” she concluded.
