Hollywood star George Clooney, while promoting his new movie 'The Boys in the Boat,' opened up about his friendship with the late actor Matthew Perry. He has revealed that despite the fame and success starring in 'Friends' got Perry, it didn't get him happiness, due to his struggles with addiction.
Clooney took a trip down memory lane and recalled the time he first met Perry, “I knew Matt when he was 16 years old. We used to play paddle tennis together. He’s about 10 years younger than me. He was a great, funny, funny, funny kid.”
He further revealed that Perry's dream was to star in a sitcom, which he did accomplish as Chandler Bing in 'Friends.' "He was a kid and all he would say to us, I mean me, Richard Kind and Grant Heslov, was, ‘I just want to get on a sitcom, man. I just want to get on a regular sitcom and I would be the happiest man on earth,'" Clooney said.
“And he got on probably one of the best ever. He wasn’t happy. It didn’t bring him joy or happiness or peace,” he added.
Clooney explained that despite the fact that the two worked side by side every day, he had no idea about his condition. Clooney was filming 'ER' at the time, and Perry was filming 'Friends.' "And watching that go on on the lot — we were at Warner Brothers, we were there right next to each other — it was hard to watch because we didn’t know what was going through him."
"We just knew that he wasn’t happy and I had no idea he was doing, what, 12 Vicodin a day and all the stuff he talked about, all that heartbreaking stuff. And it also just tells you that success and money and all those things, it doesn’t just automatically bring you happiness," he added. "You have to be happy with yourself and your life."
Despite Perry's battle with substance abuse during his time on 'Friends,' he always spoke highly of the impact of the role he played, and how it got him and his co-stars -- Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer -- fame and success. "It changed my life in every way. I got the show when I was a 24-year-old man; the show ended when I was 34. It formed my life. And it was the time of my life," Perry had previously told PEOPLE.
On October 28, at the age of 54, Perry was found dead at his residence. The autopsy report indicated that his passing resulted from a combination of drowning, ketamine and buprenorphine.
