Perry was open in his 2022 memoir, “Buddies, Lovers, and the Huge Horrible Factor,” about what number of private experiences he drew on for the character that made him well-known: his mother and father’ separation when he was solely 9 months outdated, his panic flying alone at age 5 to see the daddy who’d deserted him, his cataclysmic nervousness when his mom (in her capability because the press secretary for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) did not catch his eye throughout public appearances. Even his feeling that he didn’t fairly belong to both guardian’s new household once they remarried and reproduced. “It wasn’t that I assumed I may play ‘Chandler,’ I was Chandler,” he wrote, revealing that the “Buddies” creators requested the forged about themselves with an eye fixed towards utilizing points of their personalities and histories. Perry advised them that although he thought of himself “not unattractive,” he had “disastrous relationships” and, crucially: “I used to be not snug in any silence in any respect — I’ve to interrupt any such second with a joke. And this grew to become a built-in excuse for Chandler Bing to be humorous.”
Perry’s Chandler was skittish and candy, broken and conflicted and dysfunctional — a eager observer deeply satisfied of his personal unworthiness in a manner that didn’t really feel like a joke. He felt just like the joke, at all times; the bits have been only a approach to masks a bottomless want for reassurance, a software to cease folks from leaving him. He discovered sincerity, when he tried it, terrifying. “I’ve scared ya,” the character stated to his girlfriend Janice (Maggie Wheeler) within the present’s third season, as she fled in response to his panicked suggestion that they stay collectively. “I’ve stated an excessive amount of. I’m hopeless and awkward and determined for love!”
Perry delivered that individual line frantically and nicely again within the fall of 1996, with a chaotic edge scrambling the mannered emphasis that characterised so a lot of his line readings. (And which, for a time, modified the way in which a lot of the nation talked.) It’s a very affecting scene to look at now for a few causes. The primary is solely that Perry himself was so visibly unwell: he admitted discovering that second arduous to look at in a 2022 interview with Diane Sawyer as a result of he remembered the desperation he felt. He was uncontrolled, dropping horrifying quantities of weight (he’d ultimately backside out at 128 kilos) and wrestling with addictions that might land him in rehab greater than a dozen instances — and within the hospital for 5 months after his colon burst from opioid abuse, very almost killing him.
The second has to do with the plot of that episode, “The One with the Metaphorical Tunnel.” Chandler’s concern of dedication had been kicking in, so he was conducting an experiment by committing arduous to Janice as an alternative of fleeing. He overshot the mark and her departure — now that he’d tried to maintain her — despatched him right into a tailspin. It’s a model of a tortured dynamic Perry repeatedly described in his memoir, which is as a lot about his despair over how he sabotaged his possibilities at love (and the way a lot he wished and seemed ahead to discovering it, and having kids) as it’s about dependancy.
“I’ve spent my life being interested in unavailable ladies,” Perry wrote. “It doesn’t take a psychology diploma to determine that this had one thing to do with my relationship with my mom.” The second they got interested, his curiosity dipped (“they have been obtainable, so I had no want for them”), and when relationships bought dangerously good, he made a behavior of leaving earlier than they might. “Why would she not?” he wrote of his relationship with Julia Roberts. “I used to be not sufficient; I may by no means be sufficient; I used to be damaged, bent, unlovable. So as an alternative of going through the inevitable agony of dropping her, I broke up with the gorgeous and good Julia Roberts.”
It is a difficult and unattractive dynamic, bordering on caddish (which Perry frankly admits). In his e-book, Perry does his finest to unpack it and apologize to the ladies he dumped. “I’m grateful, and sorry. Oh, and obtainable,” he half-joked.
However on “Buddies,” Perry bought this bundle of traits as comedy and, simply as importantly, as pathos. Chandler wasn’t a kind when he stepped into the character at 24, however he grew to become one. He got here to outline — and clarify — a sure sort of damaged, half-defended, humorous however anhedonic Gen X masculinity. Chandler Bing was a person yanked hither and yon by insecurities and compulsions. His dread as Janice leaves within the scene above is as horribly actual as it’s humorous. Perry managed to make his character’s distaste for her (which at instances bordered on hatred and memorably prompted him to pretend a transfer to Yemen) coexist fairly believably with an agonized want for her that escalated to panic at any time when she left.
That is no small feat. Perry bought quite a lot of credit score for his impeccable timing, his nimble physicality and his present for mining a line for sudden beats. (Actually, he grew to become a sufferer of his personal success on this final entrance: “I’d needed to beg the producers to let me not communicate like Chandler for the ultimate few seasons,” he wrote. “That specific cadence — may it be extra annoying? — had been so performed out that if I needed to put the emphasis within the improper place yet one more time, I assumed I’d explode, so I simply went again to saying traces usually, for probably the most half in season six after which past.”)
However his biggest achievement — particularly contemplating how uncontrolled he was and the way a lot he was struggling — was how exactly and sweetly he rendered the plight of a personality dancing desperately for laughs (and trapped by incompatible wishes) in ways in which borrowed really and tragically from his life. There’s one thing poignant about Perry making an attempt to not speak “like” the character he created, and it’s troublesome to learn in his memoir, given how quickly after its publication he would die, that he wished his work on “Buddies” to be “manner down on the listing of issues I had achieved.”
Perry had a nice profession. He received Emmy nominations for his “West Wing” appearances, his closing season on “Buddies,” and his function as Ron Clark within the 2007 restricted collection “The Ron Clark Story.” “The Complete 9 Yards” was successful. It was enjoyable to see him wherever he turned up: on “Ally McBeal,” on Lisa Kudrow’s semi-scripted, largely improvised present “Net Remedy.” He was pleased with his work on “Studio 60 on the Sundown Strip,” “Mr. Sunshine” and the 2012 sitcom “Go On.” He completed his e-book. In spite of everything his struggles, he deserved aid and a recent begin. He was writing screenplays. He had hopes.
He didn’t get the second act he wished and deserved. However we are able to concurrently admire, be thankful for, and lament how a lot of himself he left on the sector together with his first.