Matthew Perry Says He Dumped Julia Roberts Because He Didn’t Think He’d Ever Be Enough
Matthew Perry is promoting his new memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, and, so far, he’s shared some pretty grim details about his addiction. Last week he revealed that his opioid addiction led to a ruptured colon that almost killed him. Yesterday we learned he’d spent almost $9 million getting sober. Today, in an excerpt published by The Times of London, Matthew tells the tale of his failed romance with one-time Friends guest star the Holiday Armadillo Julia Roberts. Awesome, free PR for Julia’s new movie!
Julia and Matthew dated way back in 1996. She had signed up to guest on the second season Friends episode, The One After the Superbowl (that’s also the one with guest star Jean Claude Van Damme), and Matthew says she requested to have a storyline with Chandler. She played his love interest/former elementary school classmate, Susie. By the time they filmed the episode, the pair were already dating, via People:
Perry says that he went to New Mexico to ring in 1996 with her and met her family. “I did let her in, both figuratively and literally, and a relationship began,” the actor wrote, according to the publication. “We would already be a couple by the time we started filming the Friends Super Bowl episode.”
Matthew says that the relationship lasted two months before he decided to dump Julia, which totally shocked her:
“Two months later, I was single,” Perry writes. “Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unloveable.”
He continued: “So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can’t begin to describe the look of confusion on her face.”
OK, but maybe Julia didn’t see it as slumming with a TV guy, cuz both her husbands are out-there choices: Lyle Lovett and Danny Moder, who she met when he was a (married) camera assistant on The Mexican (2000). And Friends-era Matthew Perry certainly had more clout than a lowly camera assistant.
Even though Matthew’s tale is full of self-hate, it’s still lighter than the “I almost ruptured my colon” story. Also, it gives me hope: what if every guy who ever dumped or ghosted me was simply intimidated by my beauty and magnetism? Ya know, Matthew said he wrote this memoir to help people, and today he has!
Pic: NBC