Following in the footsteps of Friends costars Matt LeBlanc and Courteney Cox, who posted heartfelt messages on Instagram dedicated to departed costar Matthew Perry yesterday, Jennifer Aniston herself took to the social media platform on Wednesday to add to the chorus of voices honoring Perry. Her message was the longest so far—and also revealed one intimate text he sent her “out of nowhere.”
“Oh boy this one has cut deep... Having to say goodbye to our Matty has been an insane wave of emotions that I’ve never experienced before,” Aniston wrote. “We all experience loss at some point in our lives. Loss of life or loss of love. Being able to really SIT in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep. And we loved him deeply. He was such a part of our DNA.”
“We were always the 6 of us,” Aniston continued. “This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be. For Matty, he KNEW he loved to make people laugh. As he said himself, if he didn’t hear the ‘laugh’ he thought he was going to die. His life literally depended on it. And boy did he succeed in doing just that. He made all of us laugh. And laugh hard. In the last couple weeks, I’ve been pouring over our texts to one another. Laughing and crying then laughing again. I’ll keep them forever and ever. I found one text that he sent me out of nowhere one day. It says it all.”
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Aniston shared a text Perry had sent her. It reads: “Making you laugh just made my day. It made my day :)”
“Rest little brother,” she added. “You always made my day.”
In his memoir published just last year, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry wrote that he was “immediately taken” by Aniston when he met her through mutual friends, but that this crush wasn’t necessarily reciprocated.
“Looking back, it was clear that [she thought] I liked her too much, or in the wrong kind of way... and I only compounded the error by then asking her out,” Perry wrote. “She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me.”
Perry and Aniston became stalwart friends throughout the length of the series, and Perry recalled that his crush on his co-star became easier to get over once she began dating her future ex-husband Brad Pitt.
But Perry also wrote that Aniston was the cast member brave enough to confront him about his drug use on the set of the TV show that made them famous.
“‘I know you’re drinking,’” Perry wrote that Aniston told him. “To be confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating. And I was confused. ‘How can you tell?’ I said. I never worked drunk. ‘I’ve been trying to hide it.’”
“‘We can smell it,’ she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural ‘we’ hit me like a sledgehammer,” Perry added.
