George Clooney is giving heartbreaking details on Matthew Perry‘s life.
Over a month after the Friends actor died at age 54, Clooney shared what Perry was really when the cameras weren’t rolling.
“I knew Matt when he was 16 years old,” he told Deadline in an interview published Dec. 19. “We used to play paddle tennis together… And he was a great, funny, funny, funny kid.”
While hanging out with actors Richard Kind and Grant Heslov, Perry would tell them, “‘I just want to get on a sitcom, man. I just want to get on a regular sitcom and I would be the happiest man on earth,'” according to Clooney.
However, even after Perry landed the role of Chandler Bing on Friends—playing the funny pal from 1994 to 2004—he still didn’t feel fulfilled.
“He got on probably one of the best ever,” the ER star noted of the show. “He wasn’t happy. It didn’t bring him joy or happiness or peace. And watching that go on on the lot—we were at Warner Brothers, we were there right next to each other—it was hard to watch because we didn’t know what was going through him. We just knew that he wasn’t happy.”
