Mr. Showbiz: Your dad was in the entertainment biz when you were growing up, and you saw a lot of what he went through. Was there any point in time when that exposure turned you off to the idea of a career in acting?
Matthew Perry: I always wanted to be in the business, and I was lucky enough to have someone in the other room while growing up that everything had happened to: everything good, everything bad. So when something would happen to me as an actor, I'd come home and say, "This happened. What do I do?" And he'd say, "Well, 1973-- here's what I did." It was great.
Mr. Showbiz: You were cast in your first film role after being "discovered" by director William Richet while sitting in a restaurant. Will you elaborate on what happened that day?
Matthew Perry: I was skipping school, I was in the tenth grade. Let that be a lesson to all the children out there. I ws at a restaurant with three girls, so I was trying to be funny in an effort to impress them. And I got a note on a napkin from William Richert saying he would really like me to be in his next movie and to call him. So I did and two months later I was on the set of A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon in Chicago. This would be a much better story if the movie had been a huge success.
Mr. Showbiz: I've heard that when you moved to Los Angeles, your goal originally wasn't to get into acting, but to play tennis.
Matthew Perry: Yes. I came to Los Angeles to be a professional tennis player because I thought this was where the best tennis was. And it was so good that I got killed by everybody, so I had to decide to go into something else. I auditioned for a school play and had such a fun time doing it, I thought maybe I ought to pursue this.
Mr. Showbiz: George Clooney talks about the frustration of being in television shows that don't work. He was in five of them. You've had a few of those yourself. What does that feel like?
Matthew Perry: I was in four failed series. You feel lucky on the one hand because you are working. Eighty percent of actors are not working. You feel it's too bad the show isn't working. But on most shows, I felt stifled creatively. I thought, "Hey, I can be funny in this kind of format and situation. Please let me." And most of the (producers) I worked with didn't let me. Which is why it was such a relief to get to the set of Friends where they said, "If you come up with some funny things and we think they are funny, we'll put them in."
Mr. Showbiz: How has Friends changed your life?
Matthew Perry: Pretty much completely. Mostly, it gave me the opportunity to do the exact kind of work I had always wanted to do and the exact kind of format that I had always loved, which was having an opportunity to be funny and to work in an environment surrounded by funny, talented people, in an open kind of forum. There is nobody tyrannical on the set of Friends. The producers are open to our ideas and thoughts. I have been in certains TV shows and movies where I was just a talking head -- just read the line the way it's written and go home.
Mr. Showbiz: You're also a writer. Do you ever write characters for yourself?
Matthew Perry: Yes. My writing partner, Andrew Hill Newman, and I wrote a TV pilot (called Maxwell House) in 1992 because I was convinced I could write something better than the things I had been in on television. We were lucky enough to sell it, and I was lucky enought to be a writer for a year. After the success of Friends, Andrew and I decided to write a movie. So we wrote a movie and sold that too. It hasn't been filmed yet, but hopefully that's in my future. The script is called Imagining Emily. It's a story about a guy who is kind of set in his ways when hiw imaginary friend from childhood, who is a girl, comes back into his life --grown and beautiful-- and he falls in love with her.
Mr. Showbiz: Did you have an imaginary friend when you were a little boy?
Matthew Perry: No.
Mr. Showbiz: Do you now?
Matthew Perry: Yeah. She's right here. (Laughs) No, I don't.