Matthew Perry once shared the reason why the hit show ‘Friends’ stopped after 10 seasons.
One year before he passed away at the age of 54, the actor opened up about saying goodbye to the hit show.
“Aniston was sobbing — after a while, I was amazed she had any water left in her entire body. Even Matt LeBlanc was crying,” the actor said in his memoir, ‘Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.’
“But I felt nothing; I couldn’t tell if that was because of the opioid buprenorphine I was taking, or if I was just generally dead inside,” Perry added.
“So, instead of sobbing, I took a slow walk around the stage with my then-girlfriend — also appropriately called Rachel [Dunn] — stage 24 at Warner Bros. In Burbanks (a stage that after the show ended would be renamed ‘The Friends Stage.’)
“We said our various goodbyes, agreeing to see each other soon in the way that people do when they know it’s not true, and then we headed out to my car.”
The late star also revealed that it was Aniston who brought up the idea of ending the show.
“The truth was, we were all ready for ‘Friends’ to be done,” he said.
“For a start, Jennifer Aniston had decided that she didn’t want to do the show anymore, and as we all made decisions as a group, that meant we all had to stop,” Perry continued.
“Jennifer wanted to do movies; I had been doing movies all that time and had ‘The Whole Ten Yards’ about to come out, which was sure to be a hit,” he went on.
“… Even though it had been the greatest job in the world, the stories of Monica, Chandler, Joey, Ross, Rachel and Phoebe had all pretty much played out by 2004.”
Perry also admitted that he asked co-creator Marta Kauffman if he could say the last line.
“No one else will care about this except me,” he expressed. “So may I please have the last line?”
In the final scene, Rachel asks them if they wanted to have some coffee first, to which Chandler responded: “Sure. Where?”
“I got to bring the curtain down on ‘Friends,’” Perry wrote. “I love the look on Schwimmer’s face as I deliver that line — it’s the perfect mixture of affection and amusement, exactly what the show ‘Friends’ had always given to the world.”
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