The actor appeared alongside Perry in the final two seasons of the hit series
Paul Rudd is sharing sweet memories of getting to know Matthew Perry on the set of Friends.
In a Tuesday, April 1, WSJ Magazine profile, the Death of a Unicorn star recounted how, shortly after he joined the beloved sitcom’s cast in 2002, Perry spotted him walking by his dressing room and called him in to play video games.
“I’m not really a gamer. I don’t know if he was either,” Rudd recalled. “But I remember thinking, this guy doesn’t really know me at all, and he’s like, ‘Come on in,’ and we’re just playing video games.”
“When I think of him, I remember that,” Rudd said of Perry, who died tragically of a ketamine overdose in October 2023 at the age of 54.
Rudd, 55, made his first appearance early in Friends’ ninth season. His character, Mike Hannigan, was introduced as a love interest for Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow), and their on-again, off-again romance lasted through the show’s 10th and final season, in which they got married.
Despite Perry’s warm welcome and Rudd’s enduring friendship with the rest of the cast, creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman suggested that Rudd may have felt out of place in the Friends’ series finale. The actor had a brief cameo in the two-part May 2004 episode, in which Mike and Phoebe decide to start trying for a baby.
“I know he has said that he felt a little like, ‘Why am I here? It should be just the six of them,’ ” Crane told WSJ. “But I think it was our need to legitimize that Mike really is Phoebe’s future. If you didn’t see him in the episode, it would feel a little bit like TV bulls—.”
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“That episode was so much about moving on and having a life that may not bring you back here. He was part of that for Phoebe,” Kauffman agreed. “He was the guy who was going to make her happy for the rest of her life.”
Rudd did skip HBO Max’s highly anticipated 2021 Friends reunion special. “The main nub of the show has got to be about the six cast members,” the special’s director Ben Winston told The Wrap at the time. “So you can’t have too many cameos because of course, there were hundreds of amazing people who were in Friends over the years. Sadly, we couldn’t get everybody in.”
While Winston didn’t mention Rudd specifically, he did note that filming the reunion in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic was “complicated.”
“Some people couldn’t fly internationally, some people were on other TV or film shoots, some people are in bubbles on stuff,” he explained.
Nevertheless, Rudd told PEOPLE the following November that he’d rediscovered Friends while watching reruns with his daughter.
“I hadn’t really revisited many of those episodes. But now that she’s watching it, it’s like, ‘Oh, I remember this,’ and I tell her some story about it,” Rudd said. “I’m far enough away from some things now that I can allow myself to be a little nostalgic about it.”
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