Julia Roberts Breaks Her Silence on Ex Matthew Perry

Julia Roberts has broken her silence on the "heartbreaking" death of her ex-boyfriend, Matthew Perry. The late Friends star died at the age of 54 due to an [inlink id="matthew-perry-dies-at-54" text="apparent drowning on October 28"], which also happens to be Roberts' birthday. "The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking," she told Entertainment Tonight. "It just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can." Roberts, 56, Perry became friendly in the '90s, shortly before the Pretty Woman star guest appeared as a childhood classmate of Perry's Chandler Bing in the season two episode, "The One After the Super Bowl." She said of her experience on the beloved sitcom that the cast was all "so welcoming" to her as just a "one-off character." The actress added that it was a fun time with "all good thoughts and feelings." In Perry’s 2022 memoir [inlink id="matthew-perry-opens-up-about-addiction" text="Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing"], he revealed that Roberts only agreed to star in the hit NBC show if her character would somehow fit into Chandler Bing’s story arc. At the request of the show’s producer, Marta Kauffman, he further encouraged Roberts to appear on the show by sending her roses and a personal card. Perry courted her for three months via daily faxes of three or four a day. The end result was hundreds of faxes back and forth between the two. [inlink id="matthew-perry-911-dispatch-audio" text="RELATED: Matthew Perry 911 Dispatch Audio Mentions ‘Drowning’"] According to Perry, he became “captivated” by what Roberts wrote to him. "The way she strung sentences together, the way she saw the world, the way she articulated her unique thoughts, all was so captivating,” he recalled. The faxes between the two actors “veered romantic” before morphing into “five-hour” phone calls. She then showed up on his doorstep one day. A few months later, the couple split as a result of his addiction issues making him feel like he was “not enough” for the actress. “Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me,” Perry wrote in his memoir. "I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unloveable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts." Following his romance with Roberts, Perry went on to date Lizzy Caplan for six years and was briefly engaged to literary manager Molly Hurwitz from 2020 to 2021. [select-listicle listicle_id="383532" syndication_name="friends-thanksgiving-episodes-ranked" description="yes"]