Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (12 page)

One day, though, Craig Bierko called me out of the blue. He wanted to come by and see me. I was delighted, but apprehensive. You know that feeling when you end up dating someone your best friend had a crush on? It felt like that; I'd taken the role he could and should have taken, and everything had gone gold for me, then platinum, then some other rare metal as yet undiscovered.

I had no idea how a meeting with my former friend would go. Marta Kauffman would later comment, “We saw a countless number of actors
[for Chandler], but things happened as they were supposed to happen.” But I couldn't say anything like that to Craig, because the thing that was supposed to happen—the miracle—had happened to me, not to him. (That had been his choice, not mine.)

When he got to my apartment, the tension was high. Craig spoke first.

“I want you to know that I am very sorry for not speaking to you for two years,” he said. “I simply could not handle that you got rich and famous doing a role that I turned down. We were both good enough to get that role, and yeah, so, I just could not handle it.…”

I heard him out; there was a silence. The traffic on Sunset was backing up all the way to the Fred Segal on La Cienega.

I decided I wouldn't mention Fred Segal.

I hated what I was
actually
about to say, but I had to say it.

I said: “You know what, Craig? It doesn't do what we all thought it would. It doesn't fix anything.” (What a sobering thought for a twenty-six-year-old who had only ever wanted fame and had only just realized that fame hadn't filled the holes at all. No, what had filled the holes was vodka.)

Craig stared at me; I don't think he believed me; I
still
don't think he believes me. I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realize they are the wrong dreams.

Later, when I was promoting
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,
I told
The Guardian,
“I've been on the least-watched show in the history of television [
Second Chance,
in 1987] and the most-watched [
Friends
] and none of it really did what I thought it was going to do to my life.”

Given everything, there is no way I wouldn't change places with Craig, and David Pressman, and the guy in the gas station down the block—I'd change places with all of them in a minute, and forever, if only I could not be who I am, the way I am, bound on this wheel of fire. They don't have a brain that wants them dead. They slept fine at
night. I don't expect that would make them feel any better about the choices they made, the way their lives went.

I would give it all up not to feel this way. I think about it all the time; it's no idle thought—it's a coldhearted fact. That Faustian prayer I made was a stupid one, the prayer of a child. It was not based on anything real.

But it became real.

I have the money, the recognizability, and the near-death experiences to prove it.

Finally, back in LA, from Switzerland. It was Covid time. Everything everywhere was shut down. We'd all closed ourselves off in little rooms, terrified of death. My head was clearing up, though, and I was once again in a battle for sobriety.

The pandemic was slightly easier for me to handle for two reasons. (1) It was happening outside of my head. And (2), it gave me a pretty damn good excuse for hiding out in my 10,400-square-foot apartment on the entire fortieth floor of the Century Building in Century City.

My ribs had started to feel a bit better at least and I was sobering up. That meant that I was slowly beginning to realize that I was engaged, lived with a woman and two dogs. Needless to say, I was not ready for any of this. You live with me? We live together? We have kids' names picked out, the whole nine yards, which is the name of a movie I once made?

You went down on one knee to propose, which really hurt your stomach, remember?

I didn't remember—needless to say, we broke up.

You know how during Covid some people felt like they were living the same day over and over and over again?

Here's the day I wish I could live over and over again (this is the Groundhog Day of my Groundhog Day). In fact, I wish I could relive it every day for the rest of my life. But I cannot. So, the only way to get past it is to tell it like a story, see if that helps.

(This of course will not bring it back.)

It was New Year's Eve 1995, Taos, New Mexico. All afternoon we'd been playing football in the snow. Me, and my girlfriend, Julia Roberts, and a bunch of our friends. She was the biggest movie star in the world, and I was on the number one show on TV.

The courtship had initially been conducted via fax. Somewhere in the world, there is a stack of faxes about two feet long—a two-foot-long courtship, filled with poems and flights of fancy and two huge stars falling for each other and connecting in a beautiful, romantic way.

At the time, I was walking on air. I was the center of it all and nothing could touch me. The white-hot flame of fame was mine—I kept passing my hand through it, but it didn't burn yet; it was the inert
center. I had not learned yet that fame would not fill the hole, but at the time it filled it just nicely, thank you very much.

Season one of
Friends
had been a smash hit, and I had basically floated into season two. I'd done Letterman; I was slated to do Leno. We'd hit the cover of
People
magazine and
Rolling Stone
magazine when both were a big deal. Now, the movie offers were coming in. Why would they not? I was getting anything I wanted. Million-dollar movie offer here, million-dollar movie offer there. I was no Julia Roberts, but there was only one of those.

Then something that only happens to famous people happened. Marta Kauffman approached me and said that I should probably send flowers to Julia Roberts.

You mean the biggest-star-in-the-universe Julia Roberts?

“Sure, great, why?” I said.

Turned out Julia had been offered the post–Super Bowl episode in season two and she would only do the show if she could be in my story line. Let me say that again—she would only do the show if she could be in
my
story line. (Was I having a good year or what?) But first, I had to woo her.

I thought long and hard about what to say on the card. I wanted it to sound professional, star to star. (Well, star to much bigger star.) But I wanted something a tad flirty in there, too, to match what she had said. I'm still proud of what I settled on. I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read:

The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers.

Not bad right? I was afraid to go to sleep at night, but I could pour on the charm when called for. But my work here was far from done. Her reply was that if I adequately explained quantum physics to her,
she'd agree to be on the show. Wow. First of all, I'm in an exchange with the woman
for whom lipstick was invented,
and now I have to hit the books.

The following day, I sent her a paper all about wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle and entanglement, and only some of it was metaphorical. Alexa Junge, a staff writer on the show, told
The Hollywood Reporter
many years later that “[Julia] was interested in [Matthew] from afar because he's so charming. There was a lot of flirting over faxing. She was giving him these questionnaires like, ‘Why should I go out with you?' And everyone in the writers' room helped him explain to her why. He could do pretty well without us, but there was no question we were on Team Matthew and trying to make it happen for him.”

In the end, all our efforts worked. Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift: bagels—lots and lots of bagels. Sure, why not? It was Julia fucking Roberts.

Thus began a three-month-long courtship by daily faxes. This was pre-internet, pre–cell phones—all our exchanges were done by fax. And there were many; hundreds. At first, it was the edges of romance: I sent her poems, asked her to name the triple crown line on the Los Angeles Kings, that kind of thing. And it wasn't like we weren't both busy—I was shooting the most popular show on the planet, and she was shooting a Woody Allen movie,
Everyone Says I Love You,
in France. (Of course she was.) But three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive. I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of ten, one had. They were so smart—the way she strung sentences together, the way she saw the world, the way she articulated her unique thoughts, all was so captivating. It wasn't uncommon for me to read these faxes three, four, sometimes five times,
grinning at that paper like some kind of moron. It was like she was placed on this planet to make the world smile, and now, in particular, me. I was grinning like some fifteen-year-old on his first date.

And we had never even spoken yet, much less met each other.

Then early one morning, something changed. Julia's fax veered romantic. I called a friend and said, “I'm in over my head. You have to come over right away. Tell me if I'm wrong.”

When he arrived, I showed him the fax and he said, “Yup, you are not wrong. You are most certainly in over your head.”

“What am I supposed to send back?”

“Well, how do you
feel?
”

“Oh, fuck off,” I said, “just tell me what to say.”

So, “Cyrano” and I compiled and sent a fax that veered romantic, too. Then we stood there, by the fax machine, looking at each other. Two men just staring at a machine.

After about ten minutes, the jarring sound of the fax machine—all bongs and whirrs and hissing messages from outer space—filled my apartment.

“Call me,” it said, and her phone number was at the bottom.

I picked up the phone and called Julia Roberts. I was nervous as hell, as nervous as my first appearance on Letterman. But the conversation went easy—I made her laugh, and man, what a
laugh.…
She was clearly extremely smart, a big intellect. I could tell already that she was easily in the top three of storytellers that I had ever met, too. Her stories were so good, in fact, that at one point I asked her if she had written them out ahead of time.

Five and half hours later, as we came to a close, I realized I wasn't nervous anymore. After that we could not be stopped—five-hour conversations here, four-hour conversations there. We were falling; I wasn't sure into what, but we were falling.

It was clear that we were in deep smit.

One Thursday, my phone rang again.

“I'll be at your house at two
P.M.
, Saturday.”

Click.

And there we had it.

How did she even know where I lived? What if she didn't like me? What if the faxes and the phone calls were all really cute but when it came to real life, she didn't want me anymore?

Why can't I stop
drinking
?

Sure enough, at 2:00
P.M.
that Saturday, there was a knock on my door.
Deep breaths, Matty.
When I opened it, there she was, there was a smiling Julia Roberts on the other side.

I believe I said something like:

“Oh,
that
Julia Roberts.”

Even in moments like this, the jokes just flew by. Craig would have said it faster, but he wasn't there. She laughed that Julia Roberts laugh, the one that could launch a thousand ships. And any tension seemed to just vaporize.

She asked me how I was doing.

“I'm feeling like the luckiest man in the word. How are
you
doing?”

“You should probably invite me in now.”

I did let her in, both figuratively and literally, and a relationship began. We would already be a couple by the time we started filming the
Friends
Super Bowl episode.

But before we filmed it, it was New Year's Eve, in Taos. It was about to be 1996. I was dating Julia Roberts. I'd even met her family. She picked me up in her orange Volkswagen Beetle, after flying me there privately. I thought I had money
. She
had money.

We'd played football in the snow all day. Later, Julia looked at me, looked at her watch—11:45
P.M.
—took my hand, and said, “Come with me.”

We jumped in this big blue truck and drove up a mountain, snow
swirling around. I had no idea where we were going. We seemed to be heading up into the very stars themselves. Eventually, we reached a mountaintop, and for a moment the weather cleared, and we could see New Mexico and beyond, all the way back to Canada. As we sat there, she made me feel like the king of the world. A gentle snow was falling, and with that, 1996 began.

In February, Julia went on Letterman
,
and he pressed her on whether or not we were dating. She had just guest starred in the
Friends
episode “The One After the Super Bowl.” That episode—replete as it was with guest stars like Julia, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Brooke Shields, and Chris Isaak, among others—was viewed by 52.9 million people, the most watched show ever to follow a Super Bowl. The ad revenue alone was staggering—more than half a million dollars for thirty seconds of airtime. The show was now solidly NBC's major cash cow.

(And yet, I can still recall a couple of nights thinking,
I wish I was on
ER
instead of
Friends. I could never get enough attention. The problem was still there, my fingerprint, the color of my eyes.)

We'd filmed Julia's part of the double episode a few days after New Year's—January 6 to 8. They'd written lines for me like, “Back then, I used humor as a defense mechanism—thank God I don't do that anymore,” and “I've met the perfect woman.” Our kiss on the couch was so real people thought it
was
real.

It was. She was wonderful on the show, and our chemistry seemed to seep off televisions all across America.

To answer Letterman
,
Julia yet again proved her smarts by fucking with everyone:

“Yes, I've been going out with Matthew Perry, and for some reason, maybe because I did the Super Bowl show, people think it is the Matthew Perry from
Friends.
But, in fact, it's this haberdasher I met in Hoboken. But Matthew Perry from
Friends
is nice, too, so I don't mind that mistake.”

She also called me “awfully clever and funny and handsome.”

Everything back then was a yes.

Once we'd wrapped season two, in April I headed to Vegas to shoot my first major movie. I was being paid a million dollars to star in
Fools Rush In,
with Salma Hayek. To this day, it's probably my best movie.

If I were doing that movie now, I would travel with three people, mostly because I am scared to be alone. But back then, it was just me. I wasn't filled with fear the way I would be now. I think that's why they send young people off to war. They are
young
—they aren't scared; they are invincible.

Don't get me wrong, I was nervous about making
Fools Rush In.
There I was, in Vegas, with a $30 million movie on my shoulders. On the first day, I was being driven home and said to the driver, “You have to pull over.” He did, and I threw up from fear, right there by the side of the road.

On a movie, not only is the work done slower, but it also only works if you really are actually feeling what you're trying to portray as a feeling. This deeper work can be hard to transition to, and I found it more difficult, because on movies you tend to shoot scenes out of order.

I remember on day two of
Fools Rush In
we were shooting a scene at the obstetrician's office, hearing our baby's heartbeat for the first time. I had no idea how to get the feeling for it, given that I'd just met Salma. Later, I remember there was a scene that called for me to cry. I was very scared about that, too. I thought about it all day long and worried about it all night. I ended up by pulling it off, somehow. The trick is easy—you think of something that makes you feel really sad. But the timing is difficult, because you have to do it at exactly the right time, and you have to do it over and over again.

That day, I had been crying all day on the set of
Fools Rush In.
I
went up to Andy Tennant, the director, and said, “We've been doing this for ten hours, man. I've got nothing left in me.”

Andy said, “We need it two more times, buddy.”

The prospect of this made me burst into tears. We both laughed and agreed that there must be a little more in the tank. (I actually find dramatic acting easier to do than comedic acting. I look at a scene and think,
I don't have to be funny? This will be a snap.
I have been nominated for four Emmys in my life so far. One in comedy, and three in drama.)

But I was starting to come up with some fun strategies to tap into real feelings and to be more of a leading man than a funny sitcom actor. At noon at the Stratosphere Hotel in Vegas they have a big firework show—I told Salma to look at the hotel then because that was how
my
character felt when he first met
her
character.

Salma had tried her best, too—she came into my trailer at the start of the shoot and said, “Let's just spoon a little bit.”

I did my best Chandler impression—the double-take-and-sardonic-stare thing—and said, “Oh,
OK!
Let's just spoon a
little
bit!”

Salma always had a very elaborate and lengthy idea about how to do a scene, but her long-winded ideas weren't always helpful. There's one scene in which I'm professing my love for her. She suggested that we don't look at each other—rather, we should look out at our future together. After listening to this nonsense for about twenty minutes, I finally said: “Listen, Salma,” I said, “I'm telling you I love you in this scene. You look wherever you want, but I'm going to be looking at
you.
”