Julia Roberts is remembering her ex Matthew Perry after his “heartbreaking” death.
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight on Monday, Roberts 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.”
Perry died at his Los Angeles home on Oct. 28 of an apparent drowning. He was 54.
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Roberts, 56, began dating Perry in 1995, just before she guest-starred on Friends as Susie, a former classmate of Perry’s Chandler Bing. Recalling her stint on the beloved sitcom, Roberts told ET, “They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of a one-off character and it was a really fun time.”
She added, “All good thoughts and feelings.”
In his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry recalled going to extreme lengths to try to convince Roberts to appear on Friends.
“I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read: ‘The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,’” he wrote of the beginning of his “three-month-long courtship” with the Pretty Woman star.
Their relationship subsequently grew via fax machine, he shared: “I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived.”
By the time she appeared on Friends in 1996, the two were officially dating, with Roberts even confirming their coupledom on The Late Show with David Letterman. But Perry broke things off just two months later, citing his own insecurities about the relationship.
“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me,” he wrote in his memoir. “Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable.
“Instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts,” he continued. “She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.”
