Chandler Bing and Monica Geller's wedding remains one of the iconic moments in the series “Friends“, but for Matthew Perry's family, filming the episode is associated with far more difficult memories. The late actor's sister Mia Perry Bowick revealed that by that time, his loved ones were already seriously worried about his struggle with addiction.
“We all knew how serious his problem was and there was a feeling: who knows what will happen?“, she tells People. The family took the TV wedding especially emotionally because Matthew Perry wanted a similar life off-screen. “He wanted a partner, he wanted kids,“ his sister recalls.
Chandler, played by Matthew Perry, married actress Courteney Cox's Monica Geller in the seventh-season finale of “Friends“ in 2001. According to Mia, her brother's problems with alcohol and opioids worsened significantly during the fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons.
Matthew Perry himself describes this period without any hesitation in his memoirs “Friends, Lovers, and That Big Dreadful Thing“, published in 2022. The actor says that after filming Chandler and Monica's wedding, he was sent straight back to a treatment facility.
Perry also writes that during the most severe periods of his addiction, he reached about 55 Vicodin pills a day. According to him, drugs have long been no longer a means of feeling good, but a way to avoid severe withdrawal symptoms.
Matthew Perry's family tells his story to Netflix
Mia Perry Bowick's new confessions come just before the premiere of The One About Matthew Perry. The three-part documentary series is released on Netflix on October 27, 2026, the day before the third anniversary of the actor's death.
The production is directed by “Emmy“ winner Mary Robertson and includes previously unseen photos and videos from the family archive. Mia speaks on camera about her brother for the first time. Also participating are his close friends, former partners and people he has worked with in the cinema and in his initiatives to help addicts.
The aim of the series is to show the man behind Chandler Bing and the addiction that marked much of his life. Mia Perry Bowick, who became a psychotherapist partly because of her desire to understand her brother's problems, admits that it took her time before she felt ready to tell these memories publicly.
Matthew Perry became a global television star with the role of the sarcastic Chandler Bing. “Friends“ aired between 1994 and 2004, and the actor starred in all 236 episodes of the series along with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer.
Behind his enormous professional success, however, Perry has been fighting a long battle with addiction. It was about this that he began to speak more openly in the last years of his life and turned his personal experience into a cause to help people with similar problems.
Matthew Perry died on October 28, 2023 at the age of 54. The coroner's office determined the cause of death to be acute ketamine intoxication, and his death was ruled an accident.
The subsequent federal investigation led to criminal charges against five people involved in supplying ketamine to the actor. In May 2026, his former personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison. He is the last of the five defendants to be convicted in the case, ending the criminal prosecution that began after the death of the “Friends“ star.
The new documentary series, however, focuses not on the investigation, but on Matthew Perry's life. According to director Mary Robertson, the goal is to show a more complete portrait of the actor: the man behind one of the most popular comedic roles on television, but also the man who spent years trying to cope with addiction while making millions of viewers laugh.