Just a year before Matthew Perry’s death, he finally revealed the reason the hit show Friends came to an end after 10 seasons - and it had a lot to do with his co-star Jennifer Aniston.
After an impressive 237-episode run, the actors said their goodbyes but remained good friends in the years to come.
“Aniston was sobbing — after a while, I was amazed she had any water left in her entire body. Even Matt LeBlanc was crying,” Perry shared in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
“But I felt nothing; I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opiod buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside.”
“So, instead of sobbing, I took a slow walk around the stage with my then-girlfriend — also appropriately called Rachel [Dunn] — stage 24 at Warner Bros. In Burbanks (a stage that after the show ended would be renamed ‘The Friends Stage.’) We said our various goodbyes, agreeing to see each other soon in the way that people do when they know it’s not true, and then we headed out to my car.”
Elsewhere in the memoir, Perry revealed that Aniston was the one who brought up the idea of bowing out of the long-running series.
He explained: “The truth was, we were all ready for Friends to be done. For a start, Jennifer Aniston had decided that she didn’t want to do the show anymore, and as we all made decisions as a group, that meant we all had to stop.”
“Jennifer wanted to do movies; I had been doing movies all that time and had The Whole Ten Yards about to come out, which was sure to be a hit,” he added. “… Even though it had been the greatest job in the world, the stories of Monica, Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel and Phoebe had all pretty much played out by 2004.”
When the six main cast members of Friends started filming the NBC sitcom in 1994, they were fairly unknown in the industry - aside from Cox who appeared in a few movies and in Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing In the Dark' music video.
“It was not lost on me that Chandler had grown up way faster than I had. As a result, mostly by Jenny’s design, ten was a shortened season,” Perry added in the book. “But all the characters were basically happy at this point, too, and no one wants to watch a bunch of happy people doing happy things — what’s funny about that?”
In the lead up to the series finale, Perry admits to asking co-creator Marta Kauffman if he could utter the very last line.
“No one else will care about this except me,” he recalled saying. “So may I please have the last line?”
And have the last line he did. In the final scene, Rachel asks her friends if they want to grab a cup of coffee, Chandler simply quips, “Sure. Where?” - knowing full well they'd be going to their go-to coffee place Central Perk.
“I got to bring the curtain down on ‘Friends,’” the actor wrote. “I love the look on Schwimmer’s face as I deliver that line — it’s the perfect mixture of affection and amusement, exactly what the show ‘Friends’ had always given to the world.”
