Jennifer Aniston Says She Was “Mourning” Matthew Perry Before His Death Due to Addiction

Jennifer Aniston said she had been “mourning” her Friends co-star Matthew Perry long before he died in 2023.

During a recent interview with Vanity Fair, the actress opened up about how she and her fellow Friends castmembers — including Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer — tried to help Perry over the years during his struggles with addiction.

“We did everything we could when we could,” she said. “But it almost felt like we’d been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight. As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better.”

The Morning Show star added, “I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”

Perry, who died at age 54 from the acute effects of the anesthetic ketamine, with drowning a contributing factor, previously detailed how his friends helped him in his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. He also told Diane Sawyer in 2022 that Aniston “was the one that reached out the most” throughout his entire struggle with addiction, which dated back to his early years on the hit sitcom that ran from 1994 to 2004.

Following his death, Aniston shared a touching tribute to her late friend and co-star. “Having to say goodbye to our Matty has been an insane wave of emotions that I’ve never experienced before,” she wrote on Instagram in November 2023. “We all experience loss at some point in our lives. Loss of life or loss of love. Being able to really SIT in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep.”

She continued, “And we loved him deeply. He was such a part of our DNA. We were always the 6 of us. This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be. For Matty, he KNEW he loved to make people laugh. As he said himself, if he didn’t hear the ‘laugh’ he thought he was going to die. His life literally depended on it. And boy did he succeed in doing just that. He made all of us laugh. And laugh hard.”