“All great stories have comedy and tragedy in them, and that certainly was Matthew’s story,” Mia Perry Bowick says of her brother early in “The One About Matthew Perry,” the Netflix docuseries that debuts on Tuesday.
The three-part series is timed to the third anniversary of Perry’s death at age 54, which was caused by the “acute effects” of ketamine and followed a decades-long struggle with substance abuse. Five people charged in connection with Perry’s death have since been sentenced.
Perry was 25 when the sitcom “Friends” premiered on NBC, catapulting him to superstardom overnight as the quick-witted Chandler Bing. The new documentary looks past the sitcom persona to reveal a man cherished by those who knew him away from the spotlight, including friends, love interests and his sister Mia, who refers to him often as Matty.
In the documentary, Perry Bowick, who is 14 years younger than her famous brother, speaks publicly about him for the first time. She and Mary Robertson, the director of the documentary, joined me on a video chat to discuss the project and Matthew Perry’s legacy.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Great care was clearly taken to keep Matthew’s humanity at the center of this film. Mary, given your background with hard-hitting investigative projects like “Quiet on Set,” what were those early conversations like between the two of you regarding the balance between investigative journalism and an intimate portrait?
ROBERTSON Some of the other projects I’ve been affiliated with have adopted an investigative approach. There’s often an accountability dimension in those projects. There’s a real darkness that’s present in those stories. And I think there’s a darkness in Matthew’s story undeniably, but there is so much light in Matthew’s story. And it was really important to me, and to all of us who were involved in making the film, that we find a way to bring levity, because there’s an honesty to that approach.
PERRY BOWICK Mary and I talked a lot about being able to show what it felt like to love him and who he was outside of the roles that he’s known for, outside of his challenges with substance use. Who he was beyond all of that was incredibly important.
Matthew laid himself bare in his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.” What story was left unfinished that needed to be told here?
ROBERTSON The part that was left out of Matthew’s story, almost definitionally when you’re writing a memoir, is the experience of those who loved him. When you’re including the accounts of those who loved him, you’re able to talk about how they witnessed his genius, how they supported him through his struggles, how they managed their own grief and how that love endures across time and space.
PERRY BOWICK What I love about the documentary is that most of what we go into, you hear Matthew sharing his point of view on the same story. So it’s just from a different point of view, and he backs up everything himself in his writing or in his interviews.
Mia, you are also a psychotherapist. How did he influence your career path and your purpose?
PERRY BOWICK They’re almost directly correlated. I found out what was going on with him when I was about 16. At the time, the only thing I really knew about doing drugs was from the DARE program in the ’90s. It was very black and white. Don’t do drugs. If you do, you’ll die. There’s no nuance in there. And then when I found out my brother’s going through this, my parents weren’t able to really explain it to me because they didn’t know either.
At the time, and even now, there’s just so little that day-to-day people know about this monstrous disease. And I became very fixated on learning as much as possible.
Mary, documentaries about comedic icons who battle addiction often risk drifting into either hero worship or bleakness. What creative guardrails did you put in place to ensure you represented Matthew faithfully?
ROBERTSON A guiding principle in all of my work is to be as close to the story as we can. If we can’t be with Matthew, we must be with the people who were closest to him. And I don’t think there was necessarily an intention or a set rule that every few minutes we had to put a joke in or we had to pull back from the shadows. It was more an understanding that we had to find our way to an accurate reflection of Matthew’s essence.
In the documentary, we hear a moving story from Mia about the “Friends” cast members at Matthew’s funeral. Was there any consideration of including them?
ROBERTSON We know the “Friends” cast loves Matthew and is grieving Matthew. We did approach them about participation. They decided not to participate. I’m really honored by the contributions and stories that were shared by others who worked with Matthew on “Friends”: We have Warren Littlefield, one of the men who contributed to greenlighting “Friends,” and he tells the story of being in the room when Matthew auditioned for Chandler. He describes this instant confidence in Matthew and that sense of assurance, which is a magical thing.
The world has spent decades using Matthew’s humor as an emotional comfort blanket. What does watching him onscreen feel like for you today?
PERRY BOWICK It took me awhile to feel ready. I was at a hotel or something, and “The Whole Nine Yards” happened to be on, and I did stop and watch. It happened to be one of my favorite little scenes, when Bruce Willis tosses him a beer while they’re on a boat, and he just lets it fly past. I don’t know why that cracked me up so much.
It was just such a beautiful little light moment of dipping my toe back into watching his incredible performances. Now I have two daughters who do remember him, but they were only 3 and 5 when he passed away. And so it’s very exciting to start introducing some of his material to them. It’ll be really exciting to watch them watch him.
The post To the World, He Was Chandler. To His Sister, He Was Matty. appeared first on New York Times.
