Julia Roberts breaks her silence on the passing of long-ago beau Matthew Perry in a new interview with ET, but sidestepped an apparent invitation to do the same on ABC’s The View today.
Roberts was on The View to promote her new Netflix film, Leave the World Behind, which, ironically enough, makes repeated allusions to Friends, the classic ’90s sitcom that starred Perry, who died at 54 of an apparent drowning in his hot tub on Oct. 28.
Today, View co-host Sara Haines broached the subject by referencing Perry’s recent passing and asking Roberts to share her favorite memory of famously appearing in a 1996 post-Super Bowl episode of the sitcom.
“As you know Matthew Perry has recently passed,” Haines said. “Do you have a favorite memory of your time with Friends?”
Roberts responded that, as a “football fanatic,” to appear “on the Super Bowl episode made me feel that much closer to the Super Bowl, which I’ve never been to.”
View moderator Whoopi Goldberg then invited Roberts to attend this season’s Super Bowl, and the Friends moment passed.
In the Entertainment Tonight interview posted today, Roberts, asked about Perry, said, “The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking. I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can.” Roberts told ET that the entire Friends cast was “welcoming,” and that the experience was “a really fun time” and left her with “all good thoughts and feelings.”
In his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry fondly recalled his three-month-long romance with Roberts, which began when she agreed to make a Friends guest appearance on the condition that her role be part of a Chandler Bing storyline. Despite his initial excitement over the courtship, Perry, who details the self-doubt and substance abuse that derailed his many relationships, writes that he stunned Roberts by calling it quits.
“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me,” Perry, who played Chandler, wrote in the book. “I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
