NBC/Warner Bros. Television
Over the weekend, friends and family attended the funeral for late Friends star Matthew Perry, who passed away at the age of 54 years old on Saturday, October 28.
Perry, of course, was best known for playing Chandler Bing — the sarcastic, one-liner-slinging husband of Courtney Cox’s Monica — on the hit NBC sitcom Friends.
While Perry was obviously paid quite well for his work on Friends — the cast famously made $1 million per episode during the tenth and final season — he also had a legitimate connection to the character of Bing.
In his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which was released in late 2022, Perry said that he “was Chandler.”
“It was as if someone had followed me around for a year, stealing my jokes, copying my mannerisms, photocopying my world-weary yet witty view of life,” Perry wrote. “It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler. I was Chandler.”
Lisa Cash, an actress who once appeared on the series in the season five episode The One in Vegas: Part 1, recently reconfirmed how much Perry cared for the character, she revealed that he nixed a storyline of Chandler cheating on Monica because fans “would never forgive” him.
“I came in as a guest star and I was super excited. The scene was Chandler and Monica were arguing in Vegas about having lunch with Richard. Chandler goes up to the hotel room, orders room service and I bring it up as a hotel worker. We end up talking and laughing and connecting and Chandler ends up cheating on Monica with my character,” Cash told TMZ.
“We had rehearsed it and everything. The day before we were shooting in front of a live audience, I was told that Perry went to the writers and said the audience would never forgive [Chandler] for cheating on Monica. He was probably right! That would’ve changed possibly the course of the show and his character,” she explained.
It’s certainly a decision that wound up being massive as Chandler and Monica would go on to get married and remain together for the rest of the series as the lone consistently hitched couple (Joey remains single, Phoebe gets married in one of the final few episodes, while it’s implied that Rachel and Ross wed after the series ends).