Simpsons star Hank Azaria spoke about his long friendship with Matthew Perry and credited the late Friends actor with helping him get sober in a video shared on Instagram.
“The night I went into AA, Matthew brought me in,” said Azaria, who had a guest role on Friends across multiple seasons. “The whole first year I was sober, we went to meetings together… I got to tell him this, as a sober person, he was so caring and giving and wise, and he totally helped me get sober. And, I really wish he could’ve found it in himself to stay with the sober life more consistently.”
Perry died over the weekend at the age of 54. An official cause of death has not yet been revealed, but law enforcement has said that Perry died in an apparent drowning at his Los Angeles home.
Perry had long been open about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. He went to rehab on multiple occasions and candidly addressed his battle with addiction in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. Azaria, in his video, admitted that those close to Perry “felt like we lost him to drugs and alcohol a long time ago because, as he documented in his autobiography, there was so much suffering.”
Azaria noted that he had to put down Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing multiple times while reading it because it was “so painful.” He added: “As his friend who loved him, I knew he must be suffering, but the details of it were just devastating — physically, emotionally, mentally, psychologically.”
He continued: “It’s heartbreaking for those of us who loved him and knew him really well, personally. We missed him, we just missed him. It’s one of the terrible things about this disease, is it just takes away the person you love.”
As Azaria noted at the start of his video, Perry was the first friend he made in Los Angeles after moving there. At the time, Azaria was 21, and Perry just 16, and the pair bonded quickly after filming a TV pilot together. That show didn’t go anywhere, but the two did work together later: Azaria had a recurring guest role on Friends, and the two appeared in a 2003 production of the David Mamet play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
“Matthew and I became really good friends — we were really more like brothers for a long time,” Azaria said. “We drank a lot together, we laughed a lot together, we were there for each other in the early days of our career.”
Azaria also praised Perry’s comedic talents, not only on Friends: “In person, he was the funniest man ever. He just lived to laugh. He was like a genius. He would start to weave comedy threads together, just hanging out, a joke here, a joke there, a joke here, a joke there. And then, by the end of the night, he’d weave them all together in what was like a crescendo of hilarity. Most nights you spent with Matthew, you were crying laughing by the end.”
Along with Azaria, other tributes to Perry have poured in following his death. Both Adele and Charlie Puth honored the actor during recent shows, while Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, Yvette Nicole Brown, Allison Janney, Octavia Spencer and others also shared remembrances online. In a joint statement, Friends co-creators Marta Kauffman, David Crane, and Kevin Bright said, “We are shocked and deeply, deeply saddened by our beloved friend Matthew’s passing. It still seems impossible. All we can say is that we feel blessed to have had him as part of our lives.”
