Recently, Matthew Matthew Perry, the character of Chandler in "Friends", has repeatedly appeared in the news headlines in contrast to the low profile of many years.
On the one hand, of course, because of the much-anticipated reunion of "Friends", the role of "Chandler", as a member of the six-person group, is still an irreplaceable "small money" in everyone's mind after many years.
He can stand again in the middle of the familiar apartment, the familiar people, and the fans of the drama are happy.
But another reason for his recent increased attention has been less wonderful, on June 1, local time, People magazine exclusively reported that Matthew, 51, canceled his engagement and broke up with his 29-year-old fiancée, Molly Herwitz.
He said in a statement, "Sometimes things just fail, and that's one of them." ”
Matthew and his fiancée began dating in 2018, briefly parting hands in between, but the relationship was still good after getting back together, and they got engaged in November 2020.
When the news of the engagement broke, Matthew was interviewed and said, "I decided to get engaged. Luckily, I happen to be dating the greatest woman on the planet at this time. ”
Whether it is fans or melon eaters, they all feel that they will definitely get married, but who knows that it has not been a year, and they have waited for the news of their breakup.
Matthew has been battling drug addiction for decades, greatly damaging his health, and now he has broken up with his fiancée, the relationship is not smooth, and fans are deeper worried about all aspects of him.
From the funny and humorous little money in "Friends" to the popular Matthew Perry in real life, he always seems to be hiding his own shadow behind the fun and funny inside and outside the play.
"Friends" is the youth and memory of countless people around the world, and for people who grew up watching this show, until now they will still re-brush the play over and over again.
So these six people in the play are more like good friends who will stay in that precious decade for the audience forever.
Always young, always enthusiastic, always with friends and lovers around you.
A lot of people like the character of "Chandler" in "Friends", and that's a lot because of that.
He's best friend and can always support Joey's seemingly hopeless acting career without asking for anything in return.
Not only is he always by his side, but he will also help him pay the bills, what acting lessons, accent coaches... Even if there is no reliable opportunity, as long as Joey wants to go, he will always support unconditionally.
He is also the best husband, and although he has varying degrees of fear of commitment and intimacy because of his native family, his love for Monica overcomes it all.
Chandler in the play is impeccable as a friend and as a lover, but what is most attractive to him is his distinct personal characteristics.
He has an awkward but likable humor trait, likes to make fun of his friends, and makes jokes his lifelong career.
This "fun" is not so much his personality as a coping mechanism, as Phoebe's ex-boyfriend of the psychiatrist put it:
He has problems with intimacy, using "humor to distance himself from people", and these are basically derived from his original family.
From the appearance, Chandler is really a promising young man, specifically in the form of a good family background, his own ability is also good, engaged in a job that everyone does not know what to do, but the salary is very high.
But on the inside, he has always been afraid to make intimate connections with people. The shadow left by his original family was too great, his parents divorced before his puberty, his father was a transgender person who liked to chase after little handsome men, and his mother was a large-scale beautiful writer.
Growing up in a chaotic family environment, the impact on him was lifelong, fortunately he met friends and met the love of his life, and then he was slowly healed.
The real Matthew is also the sensitive humor of Chandler's same style, and many times, the playful qualities shown in the characters are given by the actor Matthew.
But just as small money is always affected by the original family and insecure, the real Matthew also has problems rooted in his own life.
Few people may know that Matthew, born in 1969, is actually of Canadian descent and has a similar background to Chandler.
His parents divorced before his first birthday, and when his mother remarried, he grew up with her in Ottawa
At the age of 15, he moved from Ottawa to Los Angeles to pursue acting, much like Joey, who was desperate for an acting career.
After graduating from acting school, Matthew has participated in many comedies, but almost all of them have been mediocre.
Maybe it's the failures of this series, maybe it's because there's no money, and the young Matthew is so eager to succeed that he wants to be popular overnight and become famous quickly.
"I'm steaming in my ears, I want to be famous too much."
"You want attention, you want money, you want the best seating in the restaurant."
"I need money very, very much."
That was not until he got an audition for a pilot drama called "Sixsome," which came to be known as Friends.
Later, everyone also knew that "Friends" was a huge success, so successful that it almost made history, and Matthew and his co-actors became world-famous stars.
Everything he wanted, as if he had it in the blink of an eye, whether it was money or fame...
In the first season, the six actors were paid $22,500 per episode, rose to $75,000 by the third season, and finally reached a staggering $1 million per episode in the ninth and tenth seasons.
The coveted prestige followed.
"I was making Friends from the age of 24 to 34. I was surrounded by the incandescent flame of fame. The six of us could be seen almost everywhere at any time. ”
These were all things he had always wanted, a good life like a dream.
"When these things happen, it's like Disneyland for a while. For me, it lasted about eight months, and it was the feeling of 'I'm successful, I'm so excited, there's no problem with the world for me.'
Then you will realize that it doesn't accomplish anything and certainly doesn't fill any emptiness in your life. ”
You get everything, but the problems in life will not be solved by this, especially the problems in the heart.
He chose to fill these emptinesses with alcohol, and dependence on alcohol gradually became a part of his life.
"From an outsider's point of view, I seem to have everything. It was actually a very lonely time because I had been drinking heavily. ”
In 1997, after a jet ski accident, doctors prescribed him vicotin (painkiller), which became the beginning of his drug addiction problem, and since then, he has become completely dependent on painkillers.
"It was not my intention to have a problem in this regard. But from the beginning, I loved the feeling it (Vicodin) brought me and I wanted to get more. ”
During that time, he told jokes as Chandler during the day, and after work, the situation was getting worse and worse.
The effects of the drug on him greatly affected his body, and he lost nearly 20 pounds.
"I was out of control and very unhealthy."
On the left is the third season of Friends, and on the right is the sixth season
With the extreme darkness of alcohol and drug addiction, his entire psychological state was also in a mess, suffering from severe depression.
In 1997, he went to a rehabilitation center for the first time, which usually helped drug addicts or alcoholics to rehabilitate, and he stayed there for 28 days, but the results were not very good.
In May 2000, he was hospitalized for pancreatitis, which was one of the causes of pancreatitis.
Although he knew that if he drank and sniffed again, he might lose his life, Matthew was out of control, and admission to the hospital could not sound the alarm bell for him.
On the day he was discharged from the hospital, he crashed into a house in his Porsche, which fortunately was empty at the time.
The most critical thing is that he did not have alcohol or drugs in his body at that time, so... He had reached the point where he was out of control, even if he was awake.
In 2001, his whole state reached its lowest point, he gulped vodka every day, and when he worked, his whole body was in a state of extreme hangover, completely unable to work normally. "When I work, I'm sleepy and shivering."
Even in an interview, he admitted that he "no longer remembers the three years from season three to season six of Friends." ”
After this went on for a while, it finally took a turn for the worse one day. He was in a hotel room in Dallas and felt like he had reached his limit.
"I quit drinking and drugs not because I wanted to quit, but because I was afraid I might die the next day."
On that day, when the body, which had been ruined by alcohol and drugs for a long time, threatened to die, Matthew finally woke up and called his parents for help.
He flew back to Los Angeles, where his parents took him to another rehab center, where he spent two and a half months realizing that "you can live happily without alcohol and drugs." ”
Matthew has remained sober ever since, but returned to the rehabilitation center in 2011, saying he wanted to continue his recovery life.
It seems that he has been sober for so many years, but in fact, the effects of alcohol and drugs on his body are already permanent.
Going in and out of the hospital many times, and often being photographed describing a haggard look, and then remembering the memory of the small money that was always humorous and funny, people are always full of emotions.
Years of severe alcohol and drug addiction not only destroyed his body, but also had a great negative impact on his life.
This time he broke up with his fiancée, not the first time he had a relationship failure, in fact, as a Hollywood star, Matthew and many well-known actresses have been in love, but none of them have really lasted.
Julia Roberts, for example, fell in love with Matthew at first sight when she made a cameo appearance in "Friends" in 1995.
The two are a pair of funny lovers in the play, And Susie and Chandler, played by Julia, are old classmates, but Chandler does not remember that he once teased Susie at school.
In order to avenge her old age, Susie pretended to be in love with Chandler, leaving him naked in the toilet wearing only the lady's underwear, and retaliated fiercely.
Maybe the spark between the pair was too hot, and the two had a chemistry in reality, but unfortunately, they only dated for a year before breaking up.
After that, Matthew's relationship was basically more short-lived, probably because drugs and alcohol accounted for a larger proportion of his life.
Yasmine bleeth in "Beach Ambulance", in the plot of "Friends", Chandler has a crush on this goddess for many years, and he did not expect that the two had actually been together in reality.
Actress Neve Campbell, this is a proper love affair, Matthew and her collaborated on the movie "Three-Man Tango", but when the movie was released, the relationship ended.
After that, there's the actress Maeve Quinlan,
Heather Graham，
"Gilmour Girl" actor Lauren Graham,
Rachel Dunn，
Many of them were short dates, and the longest one was probably with Lizzy Caplan, the actress who starred in "Mean Girl."
Matthew and she were together for six years, trying to keep the relationship out of the spotlight and stay on for a long time, but eventually broke up.
Until recently, with his 29-year-old fiancée Molly, Matthew's relationship led to the same ending.
It was reported last week that Molly postponed their wedding because he "flirted with other women" during their brief breakup.
And it's not ordinary flirting, some time ago a 20-year-old girl exposed her flirting content with Matthew on a celebrity dating app.
The girl was only 19 years old at the time, while Matthew was 50.
The dating app has a strict privacy policy, but the girls blew it up, mainly to expose how older men in Hollywood "take advantage" of young girls on dating apps.
In a video chat between the two, Matthew, then 50, laughed and asked her, "Am I as old as your dad?" ”
The girl said that although none of Matthew's questions were about sex, she still felt uncomfortable, especially since she had highlighted that she was only 19 years old.
The dating app scandal has sparked a lot of controversy, on the one hand, many people think that the old male stars on the dating app are "creepy", but girls posting private messages has also met with a lot of opposition.
Now it seems that this incident also affected Matthew's engagement to some extent, because some insiders revealed to the media that after the scandal, his fiancée Molly "wanted to take a breath first." ”
Regardless of the real situation behind it, Matthew, who is more than half a hundred years old, seems to be getting farther and farther away from the cute little money in his memory.
Of course, the actor can't be confused with the character, but it is difficult not to sigh to see the once spirited "friends" under the corrosion of alcohol and drugs that not only destroy the body, but also affect the entire life.