The One About Matthew Perry review – the star of one of TV’s biggest ever shows gets a loving tribute

This intimate, warm, thoughtful three-parter about the Friends actor speaks to his friends, family and ex-girlfriends – and their adoration for him is overwhelming

“God, you can do whatever you want to me, just please make me famous.” So prayed Matthew Perry when he was a young unknown actor auditioning in LA, enjoying the partying and the friendships but struggling to find work. Many have offered up such a fervent wish, of course; few have had both sides of it fulfilled in such a spectacular way as the man who became part of one of the most successful sitcoms in television history and who died after relapsing into drug addiction in 2023 at the age of just 54.

The three-part, three-hour documentary – titled, perhaps inevitably, The One About Matthew Perry – charts the whole of the actor’s rise and fall. It is an exhaustive but never (quite) exhausting film. Three hours is a long time, for sure, to tell what is in essence a sad but very simple tale, and some tiny trims could undoubtedly have been made, but it avoids tedium because of the quality of the interviews and the interviewees. The latter include his half-sister Mia and his best friends since his first days in LA, Roger Castillo and David Pressman. They all talk about the brother and the man with such love and such despair at the addictions he could not beat that it becomes at points not just a moving tribute to Perry but also to the thousands upon thousands of addicts and the people who love and despair of them, but whose stories don’t make international headlines.

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