A confession: After I acquired a information alert that the actor Matthew Perry had died, my thoughts adopted the actual cadence that Perry perfected as Chandler Bing, the character he performed for 10 seasons on the NBC sitcom “Associates.” Here’s what I assumed, “May this be any sadder?”
Perry, 54, died practically a yr after the publication of “Associates, Lovers, and the Huge Horrible Factor,” an unusually candid memoir of dependancy and restoration. As he detailed in that e book, he spent most of the greatest years of his profession oblivious, avoidant, numb — situations that don’t usually encourage nice performing. However he was nice. And it had appeared cheap, if rose-colored, to hope that sobriety may make him higher, returning him to the nervy, instinctive brilliance of his peak years. That hope is now foreclosed.
An expert actor since his teenagers, Perry had appeared in additional than a dozen sitcoms earlier than touchdown “Associates” in 1994. I first keep in mind seeing him years earlier, on an episode of “Rising Pains” screened by my college throughout a particular meeting meant to promote the hazards of drunken driving. Principally it marketed Perry and his anxious, reckless attraction.
To say that he by no means did something fairly nearly as good as “Associates,” earlier than or after, is to not diminish his achievement. Even among the many irrepressible skills of his co-stars, Perry stood out, for a rubbery, heedless method with bodily comedy and a split-second timing that almost all stopwatches would envy. If in case you have seen various episodes of the present — and lots of, many hundreds of thousands have, together with followers born years after its preliminary airing — you’ll have absorbed Chandler’s rhythms, his catchphrases, the way in which Perry’s good-looking, moony face would stretch like spandex, the higher to promote a response. He had each an absolute dedication to what a line required and a method of gently ironizing that line. His character was the butt of jokes. Perry was in on those self same jokes. There was a boyishness to him that appeared to excuse his characters’ worst conduct, on “Associates” and in subsequent roles.
These roles by no means served him as nicely and the exhibits he hooked up himself to hardly ever survived to a second season. His co-stars discovered different films and sequence to showcase their skills. Perry’s latter initiatives, regardless of superb work on “Studio 60 on the Sundown Strip” and “The Good Spouse,” have been largely grim, forgettable. It may be laborious for boys to develop up.
It appears to have been laborious for Perry. “I needed to be well-known so badly,” he advised The New York Instances in 2002. “You need the eye, you need the bucks, and also you need one of the best seat within the restaurant. I didn’t assume what the repercussions could be.” These repercussions included the enabling of his addictions and the lack of any anonymity. (It had the occasional upside, too. In his memoir, he wrote that after a response to an anesthetic stopped his coronary heart, a employee within the hospital in Switzerland carried out CPR for 5 full minutes to revive rhythm. “If I hadn’t been on ‘Associates,’ would he have stopped at three minutes?” he puzzled, darkly.)
His struggles have been an open secret, then they weren’t even a secret. (He was talking brazenly, if optimistically, as early as 2002.) And it’s a miracle, actually, that he might carry out as he did, out and in of rehab, at the same time as varied forged members confronted him about his alcohol use. He appears to have fictionalized some points of this in “The Finish of Longing,” a play he wrote and starred in. Whereas the Instances critic was cool on the drama, he wrote that Perry was “genuinely scary as a jalopy of a person operating on ethanol.”
Chatting with The Instances final yr, Perry handled his hard-won sobriety as critical and tenuous. “It’s nonetheless a day-to-day technique of getting higher,” he stated. “Day-after-day.” Onscreen he might disguise that battle. This was the genius of “Associates” and the genius of Perry, to make all of it look simple. “Associates” was at all times a fantasy, a whitewashed imaginative and prescient of city life, wherein the characters had residences with the approximate footprint of palazzos and infinite leisure time. (What was Chandler’s job anyway? Why did he so hardly ever go there?) However to look at it, as I did late Saturday evening, for hours, was to chill out into the arrogance of its comedy, of Perry’s excitable attraction. Onscreen, in that fountain, in some horrible, short-sleeved cardigan, he’s there for us, nonetheless.
