Actor Matthew Perry and actress Julia Roberts hug each other on the set of Friends. Photo / Getty Images
Actor Matthew Perry and actress Julia Roberts hug each other on the set of Friends. Photo / Getty Images
Friends star Matthew Perry has revealed how his brief relationship with Julia Roberts ended, detailing how his own pain sabotaged their love - and the very 1990s way the glamour couple conducted their courtship.
53-year-old Perry said their romance was sparked when Roberts was approached to appear on Friends in 1995. The megastar agreed, but only had eyes for Perry, and only agreed to appear if she could be in a storyline with Perry’s character, Chandler Bing.
Producers told him to get in touch to seal the deal.
“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’,” he told The Times.
“Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift – bagels, lots and lots of bagels.”
In the lead-up to filming the episodes for the iconic 90s sitcom, the pair kept in touch through that very 90s medium: the fax machine.
Perry, writing in his upcoming autobiography, ‘Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing’, says he and Roberts exchanged hundreds of messages over the span of three months while she filmed a movie in France.
“Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive,” he writes.
“I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and [would] cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived. Nine times out of ten, one had.”
"I'm also just a man, standing in front of a fax machine in an ill-fitting suit, asking a Hollywood megastar to love him". Photo / Getty Images
Staff writer Alexa Junge recalled, in a 2021 piece in The Hollywood Reporter, how Perry was assisted in getting the girl.
“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,” she said.
“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.”
By the time she appeared alongside him on Friends, Perry and Roberts were an item.
Return to sender
Sadly, their romance was doomed.
Perry’s own demons came to the fore and the troubled star, wracked with insecurity, dumped Roberts two months after her Friends appearance.
“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me,” he admitted.
“I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable.
“So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.
“She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.”
He dumped America's sweetheart. Photo / Getty Images
In the book, which details his long battle with addiction, Perry reveals that Roberts also made an appearance of sorts while he went through painful opioid withdrawals in rehab.
Five years after their brief dalliance, he sat “sweating and twitching” while he watched her win the Oscar for her role in Erin Brockovich.
“As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry, pleading, filled with longing and tears,” he wrote. “I made a joke. ‘I’ll take you back,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you back.’”
“The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now.”
