Janice From ‘Friends’ Believes Matthew Perry Visited Her as a Hawk

Maggie Wheeler, a successful character-actress best known as Janice on Friends, still feels a connection with her on-again, off-again onscreen boyfriend Matthew Perry, who passed away in October 2023 following a drug overdose.

“It hit everybody. People all over the world who loved him as Chandler, who benefitted from the joy that he spread by being a brilliant actor and by being so incredibly funny. The ripple — the wave was felt by so many,” Wheeler said on Monday’s episode of the Still Here Hollywood Podcast with Steve Kmetko. “For me, I felt just heartbroken and sad that he couldn’t make it out of this incredibly dark tunnel that he was in for so long.”

Wheeler also lost her brother to drug addiction, and she believes the two have found each other up in the heavens — or at least, in the sky.

“There was an incredible moment — I haven’t talked about this anywhere, but if you believe in these kinds of things. Lots of people talk about spirit showing up as birds… and after Matthew died, I was in a neighbor’s pool. And I was alone and there was nobody else was around and I was on my back and I was thinking about my brother, and I said, ‘Look out for him.’ And two hawks flew over my head and flew past me. One circled around and came and got the other one and it flew past me,” Wheeler said. “So, that was a beautiful moment — if you go for that kind of stuff.”

Though she’ll always be beloved as Janice, Wheeler has had a very impressive career in sitcoms. Her credits include guest spots on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother and Will & Grace, as well as recurring jobs on Ellen and Everybody Loves Raymond (in addition to Friends).

Wheeler was such a hit on Friends that the writers kept going back to the well. It got to the point, Wheeler said, where the show kept her hidden from the studio audience to get that Kramer-esque (Michael Richards on Seinfeld) pop each time Janice appeared.

“It was a sort of important characteristic of my entrances, my first entrances,” Wheeler said. “So, they would keep me hidden — I wasn’t even really allowed to wander around craft services.”

“And then they would put up a black scrim to block my entrance, to block the doorway so the audience wouldn’t see me until the door opened, until I walked in,” she continued. “They did that in many different ways depending on whether I was walking into the apartment or the coffee shop or wherever it might have been.”

“It’s a little bit of a rockstar feeling,” Wheeler acknowledged.

Watch Wheeler’s podcast appearance below: