Lauren Graham is recalling some of her fondest memories from her friendship with late Friends actor Matthew Perry — five months after he tragically passed away at age 54.
While playing host to a Q&A with fans, as part of her book tour for Have I Told You This Already? Stories I Don’t Want to Forget To Remember, the actress confessed that Perry’s death is ‘still really hard to believe.’
She then told the crowd that Perry was a ‘constant’ in her life and even alluded to a prior romantic connection.
‘While he was not technically ever a boyfriend, he was an almost in my life,’ she told the crowd, before adding that Perry was in fact ‘a friend.’
She went on to describe their relationship as two friends who would come in and out of each other’s lives at different times over the decades, according to People.
Lauren Graham is recalling some of her fondest memories from her friendship with late Friends actor Matthew Perry — five months after he tragically passed away at age 54; seen in 2006
‘We would stretch for a year, then he would come back in my life, and he had just come back in my life last year,’ the former Gilmore Girls leading lady admitted.
Graham proceeded to disclose that Perry sent her ‘a pickleball set’ for her 56th birthday in March 2023, which got plenty of smiles a laughs from the audience.
It turns out the man best known to fans for playing the role of Chandler Bing on Friends (1994-2004) had been playing pickleball earlier on the day he died, and then came back to his Los Angeles home to rest in his hot tub.
Eventually, he was found unresponsive in his hot tub and pronounced dead just after 4 p.m. that frightful afternoon.
‘He’s like really into tennis and pickleball, with a card that said, “Be older,”‘ she said, which led to her calling his death ‘a terrible loss.’
Perry had once referred to Graham as ‘one of my favorite people’ during a Q&A he hosted for his sitcom The Odd Couple (2015-2017), which ran for three seasons on CBS.
Graham would go on to play Gaby Madison in an episode of the series, which was the seventh screen production based on the 1965 play written by Neil Simon.
‘We have great chemistry when working together and it’s fun to work with a close friend,’ the actor, who played the slovenly Oscar Madison opposite Thomas Lennon as obsessively-tidy Felix Unger, told fans at the panel in 2015.
In a sign of how much his friendship with Graham meant, Perry ended up using a photo of the two pals together in his wildly successful memoir Friends, Lovers And The Big Terrible Thing (2022).
While playing host to a Q&A with fans, the actress confessed that Perry’s death is ‘still really hard to believe’ and even alluded to a prior romantic connection
Graham played Gaby Madison opposite Perry as Oscar Madison in an episode of The Odd Couple (2015), which was the seventh screen production based on the acclaimed play written by Neil Simon back in 1965
In fact, she made a point of sharing about how much the success of the book meant to him during her Q-and-A
‘The solace I take from having seen him at the time I saw him was he was so thrilled with how his book was received — and not just because it was a huge success, but because his life’s work kind of became, “How can I give back? How can I talk about the struggles I had and hopefully help someone else?”‘ she shared with riveted fans.
The Honolulu, Hawaii native maintained that Perry ‘was so pleased’ he had been contributing in that way, which made him ‘really happy.’
Previously, Graham wrote her debut novel with Ballantine Books called Someday, Someday, Maybe (2013), which was a fictionalization of her experiences trying to become an actress in New York City in the 1990s.
She turned a collection of personal essays into another New York Times best-seller with Talking As Fast As I Can, where the starlet reveals ‘stories of life, love and working as a woman in Hollywood,’ according to Google Books.
The former Gilmore Girls star made the comments about Perry while out on tour for her latest book, Have I Told You This Already? Stories I Don’t Want to Forget To Remember
While best known to many fans her her lead role in Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Graham’s Hollywood resume also includes such films as Sweet November (2001), Bad Santa (2003), The Pacifier (2005), Because I Said So (2007), Evan Almighty (2007), as well as the series Parenthood (2010-2015) and Vampirina (2017-2021).
In an interview this past November, about a month after Perry’s death, Graham gushed over her late friend when describing how much he made her laugh.
‘No one made me laugh as hard. Just tears, streaming,’ she confessed on CBS Mornings. ‘There was just such joy in being around him and being his friend.’
