Matthew Perry, aka “Chandler”, was also a bit of their friend: fans flocked to the corner of two streets in the West Village in New York on Sunday, October 29, in front of the “building” from the series Friends, to pay tribute to the actor died “too soon”, Saturday October 28 at age 54.
In this chic, trendy and tourist district of Manhattan, the building, typical of New York with its small brick facades where the mesh fire escapes hang, is already usually a place of pilgrimage for fans of the series -cult comedy from the 1990s and 2000s that has spanned generations.
On Sunday, bouquets of flowers and hand-written letters pile up on the sidewalk, at the foot of the six-story building, livened up on the ground floor by a restaurant. Under a light rain, we stop for a few minutes to reflect and pay tribute to the man who played “Chandler”, an endearing character of a joker with caustic humor and an adult who has a little trouble growing up.
“Matthew Perry, I grew up watching him on Friends, my parents watched the show too. He really had a role in my life and made me laugh so much,” says Taylor Lanthier, a 26-year-old law student in Vancouver, Canada. Passing through the city, she came to leave a yellow rose and echoed this little note placed on the ground by another hand: “thank you for all the laughter”.
A “comforting” series
One word comes up repeatedly: Friends, sometimes criticized for the sanitized and undiversified universe in which its six characters of young working New Yorkers evolve, is a “comforting” series. “It’s just a light series,” summarizes Eva, a 16-year-old high school student who lives in the neighboring Soho district. “Something I watch when I’m sad, or if I want to have a good laugh,” she adds.
And even if the episodes were filmed in a studio in California, the building at 90 Bedford Street, where the apartment where “Monica”, “Chandler”, “Phoebe” and the others are supposed to be located, makes it a iconic story of New York. Just like “Central Perk”, the café where the six friends meet.
“I’m sure you can find people who moved to New York because of Friends, just for the adventurous, romantic side of living a single life in their 20s in New York,” says guide Chris Triebel. who leads tours focused on TV shows and movies around the city.
With his group, the stop in front of the Friends building was planned for Sunday, but the death of Matthew Perry at age 54, after a life marked by years of addiction to medications and drugs that he had described in a book, makes him feel like a waste. “He’s really leaving too soon (…) He wrote brilliantly, he was a very funny actor, he could still have done a lot of things,” he regrets.