It was the romance that almost was.
But the couple who loved each other so much knew that if ever they tumbled into bed together it would spoil everything.
That may sound like a storyline from Friends but it wasn’t. It actually played out offscreen.
Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston were that couple. And just as Chandler and Rachel were never lovers despite both having plenty of other partners, nor were the actors who played them.
But now, following Perry’s tragic weekend death aged just 54, Aniston is left wondering what might have been had she fallen for him.
‘Nobody shed more tears for Matthew during the darkest points of his struggles with addiction than Jennifer,’ one close friend of the actress told DailyMail.com.
‘There was speculation at the time of the 2021 Friends reunion that Matthew wouldn’t be a part of it because his demons had gotten the better of him. But Jennifer absolutely wouldn’t have done it without him.
‘He put in the work and made it a success even though he seemed frail.’
But Jennifer genuinely thought his worst days were behind him. So his death just two years later has come as a bitter body blow to her.
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‘It doesn’t matter whether he died as a result of a freak accident or whether it was directly connected to his drug issues, this was a day that Jennifer has dreaded coming for 20 years,’ added the friend.
‘She always wanted to help Matthew any way she could – that was a constant for her.’
Perry died last Saturday after cutting short a game of pickleball. He was found underwater in the hot tub at his home in Pacific Palisades, California.
The cause of death has been deferred while waiting for toxicology reports which typically take six to eight weeks.
Police say they found prescription pills at his house but no illegal drugs.
Aniston and Perry – born just six months apart – were the youngest of the six Friends and as such stuck up an immediate camaraderie when the show first started shooting in 1994.
He wrote in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing that they had first met three years before Friends started and he tried to date her but she turned him down.
He called Jennifer first
‘I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued too – maybe it was going to be something,’ he wrote.
When he landed the Friends role, Jennifer was the first person he called, but he soon realized he had made a mistake.
‘Bad idea,’ he wrote. ‘I could feel ice forming through the phone.’
Looking back, it was clear that this made her think I liked her too much or in the wrong kind of way.’I only compounded the error by then asking her out,’ he continued.
‘She declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her) but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, ‘We can’t be friends!’
But despite making that bad first impression he said things got much better once they showed up on set for the biggest hit sitcom of the 1990s.
