When Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer broke their silence over the death of their Friends co-star Matthew Perry, it was as a group. Their joint statement was a short and eloquent message that pulsed with their palpable grief, in which they chose to share their pain collectively as “a family”, rallying around each other over this “unfathomable loss” of someone so special to them.
Putting on a united front is something that has always been one of the Friends cast’s main strengths. Perry highlighted this in his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, last year when he spoke about how Schwimmer, who at the time was considered the breakout star of the show, approached his castmates with the idea that they should negotiate their salaries as a group rather than individually.
The actors had reportedly been paid $22,500 per episode in season one, but by season two, Schwimmer and Aniston had begun earning more than the other four actors as the popularity of on/off couple Ross and Rachel took off. For season three, Schwimmer decided it was time to club together and asked Aniston if she would be willing to take a pay cut, along with him, so the others could get equal pay.
Collective cast negotiations over salaries weren’t really the norm then but the strategy has been copied since by actors on shows such as The Big Bang Theory and This Is Us. It was a selfless act of generosity that Perry applauded Schwimmer for in his memoir. “David had certainly been in a position to go for the most money, and he didn’t,” he wrote. “I would like to think that I would have made the same move, but as a greedy 25-year-old, I’m not sure I would have. But his decision served to make us take care of each other through what turned out to be a myriad of stressful network negotiations, and it gave us a tremendous amount of power.”
By season eight in 2001, he revealed, they were making $1m (£818,240) an episode – an amount that Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman called “kinda ridiculous” at the 2015 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour. “Let’s be honest, that’s a lot of money.” (Commenting on the sum in an interview for Huffington Post, LeBlanc said: “How do you put a price on how funny something is?”) By season 10, they were making $1,100,040 an episode, Perry revealed, and doing fewer episodes. “We had David’s goodness, and his astute business sense, to thank for what we had been offered. I owe you about $30m, David.”
This repeated act of solidarity, as they continued to renegotiate their salaries together, is likely to have been a key factor in what kept them together as a cast. Other TV shows regularly see core cast members leave after disagreements over their salaries. Take Lauren Cohan, who left The Walking Dead after a failed bid to get the same salary as her male co-stars (although she later returned), or Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, who quit Hawaii Five-0 due to a dispute over equal pay. Discrepancies in salaries, unsurprisingly, have a tendency to push actors to walk.
But there was no such rancour or resentment when it came to Friends. “It would’ve destroyed us, I think, if someone was soaring financially,” Aniston told WSJ Magazine earlier this year. Instead, she remained until the very end with the others to give us the perfect ending where Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, Ross and Joey’s storylines could be wrapped up neatly.
Off-screen, the Friends cast also did their best to reach out to Matty, as they liked to call him, while he battled his own demons with drink and drugs throughout the years. When he was cast as Chandler in Friends, he was 24 and had already started to drink heavily. During the show’s run, Perry was consuming 55 Vicodin a day at one point and weighed 128lb [58kg]. Aniston confronted him about his drinking, Perry wrote, in a “kind of weird but loving way”. His co-stars eventually staged an intervention in his dressing room after a read-through was cut short because he was slurring, again banding together as a family trying to help someone that they truly cared for.
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But as he told the Heart of the Matter podcast for Partnership to End Addiction, it didn’t work: “You need a professional. You need somebody who really knows [addiction]. Because what people don’t really understand is if there’s an intervention, the only thing you have to do to end an intervention is just say: ‘No. No, get out of my house.’ And then it’s over. If you have a professional, somebody who does this for a living, and an interventionist and a plane waiting and then you go to rehab, that’s the way to do it.”
In 2022, while promoting his memoir, Perry revealed to the New York Times that he had spent close to $9m (nearly £7.4m) to get clean and that he had been sober for 18 months. Through his struggle with addiction, he remained grateful for the love, kindness and support his Friends castmates showed to him. “In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better,” he wrote. “This is what my co-stars on Friends did for me.”
Perhaps, at some point, Aniston, Cox, Kudrow, LeBlanc and Schwimmer will be ready to share their individual memories and stories of Perry. But for now let’s leave them to mourn the loss of their charming, talented and vulnerable co-star, who could light up the room in an instant with his quick wit and comic timing. They remain as united in their grief as they have been during times of success – the very best of friends who’ve always had each other’s backs.