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| Could he BE anymore adorable? Or any smarter or more likeable? The answer is no and no and no again. So, are we talking about Chandler Bing or Matthew Perry? That would be a definite yes all around since, of all the Friends, Matthew Perry probably has the most in common with his small screen alter ego. Matthew Langford Perry was born on August 19, 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts but was raised in Ottawa, Ontario. He is the only child of Suzanne and John Perry, who were divorced when he was less than a year old. Perry's dad is also an actor and his mum is a former Canadian TV anchor and onetime press secretary for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. |
| Perry is a tennis-lover, which he started playing at the age of 4. At 13, he was ranked as the No.2 player in Ottawa. Perry began acting in seventh grade in a play called The Life and Death of Sneaky Fitch. His mother married Canadian anchorman Keith Morrison when Perry was 10 and proceeded to have four more children: Caitlin, Emily, Willy, and Madeline. At 15, Perry moved to L.A. to test his tennis and acting skills. He moved in with his father, John's second wife, Debbie, and their daughter Marie. Unfortunately, at Perry's first big U.S. tennis match things didn't go well, so he decided to pursue an acting career instead. In 1985, Perry starred as George Gibbs in the 1985 Buckley School production of Our Town. At 16, Perry got his first big break from a waitress in a San Fernando Valley restaurant. She gave him a napkin with a note written on it by a director who had spotted Perry while dining. Perry auditioned and won a small role in the 1988 River Phoenix film A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. In 1993, Perry and good friend Andrew Hill Newman decided to write their own sitcom, Maxwell's House, which was about the lives of twentysomething friends. By all accounts the script was pretty sharp. The problem was that NBC already had something remarkably like it in the works. This sitcom was later known as Friends. In 1994, Perry auditioned for the show and got the part of Chandler Bing. |
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| TV viewers often mistakenly make the assumption that their series favourites just make up their lines as they go along. But the one case where that exception is quite often the rule is Matthew Perry - who is every bit the incorrigible wise-ass as his character. Initially the Friends producers didn't anticipate that many storylines would revolve around Chandler. But that was before they hired Matthew. The more time they spent with him, the more his idiosyncratic speech cadences began to crop up in Chandler's dialogue. Soon, Matthew's own life began to seep into the show's storylines. After listening to him describe a date from hell along with his worries about ending up alone, for example, the writers wove the incident into a Chandler story arc. Over the last few seasons, many of Matthew's suggestions for jokes and plot turns have found their way into the show and he is the only Friend who has been allowed to sit in on the writers's sessions. All this creative give-and-take is a welcome change for Matthew, who considers himself to be as much a writer as an actor. |
| On his earlier sitcom outings, Matthew had felt stifled creatively. "I have been in certain TV shows and movies where I was just a talking head - just read the line the way it's written and go home." But he had more to offer than that. "I thought, 'Hey, I can be funny in this kind of format and situation. Please let me.' But most of the producers I have worked with didn't. 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're funny, we'll put them in.'" "I was convinced I could write something better than the things I had been in on television." Matthew says of the period in the early '90's when he began writing scripts. Not only did he co-write a sitcom pilot which caught the eye of NBC, but he has co-written a movie called Imagining Emily about a man who falls in love with a grown-up version of his imagining childhood friend - in which he is scheduled to star in some time in the future. Matthew Perry has done a few films, including Fools Rush In, Three to Tango, and Edwards and Hunt with Chris Farley. Matthew has enjoyed some 'big star' success after his role in the blockbuster hit, The Whole Nine Yards, starring opposite Bruce Willis. The two became good friends, and Bruce agreed to guest star on 3 episodes of Friends. Returning the favour, Matthew guest starred in Bruce's new film, The Kid. Although notoriously insecure and tough on himself, Matthew acknowledges that whatever happens in his big screen career, he has a heckuva day job to fall back on. He might even know now that the thing his millions of fans love most about Chandler Bing is watching Matthew Perry play himself. |
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| These bios were written by the creator of My Friends Forever and have been rewritten by myself. Please do not copy this without our permission. Please check out My Friends Forever...it's one of my FAVOURITE Friends pages with an unbelievable amount of content!! |