The actress paid tribute to her former ‘Friends’ co-star, noting that saying ‘goodbye’ to ‘Matty has been an insane wave of emotions.’
Jennifer Aniston has broken her silence on her late Friends co-star Matthew Perry’s death. The 54-year-old actress penned a heart wrenching tribute via Instagram two weeks after Perry died.
“Oh boy this one has cut deep,” the Morning Show star wrote. “Having to say ‘goodbye’ to our Matty has been an insane wave of emotions that I’ve never experienced before. We all experience loss at some point in our lives. Loss of life or loss of love. Being able to really SIT in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep. And we loved him deeply.”
Aniston added that Perry was “such a part of our DNA,” referring to the rest of the Friends cast.
“We were always the six of us,” she continued. “This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be. For Matty, he KNEW he loved to make people laugh. As he said himself, if he didn’t hear the ‘laugh,’ he thought he was going to die. His life literally depended on it. And boy, did he succeed in doing just that. He made all of us laugh. And laugh hard.”
Aniston revealed that she has been looking back at her final exchanges with Perry, noting that re-reading their text messages has caused a fluctuation in emotions.
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“In the last couple weeks, I’ve been pouring over our texts to one another. Laughing and crying, then laughing again,” she wrote. “I’ll keep them forever and ever. I found one text that he sent me out of nowhere one day. It says it all. (See the second slide…) Matty, I love you so much, and I know you are now completely at peace and out of any pain. I talk to you every day … sometimes I can almost hear you saying ‘could you BE any crazier?’”
The first photo of her carousel post featured a black and white snapshot of Aniston and Perry on the set of their hit sitcom. The second slide was a screenshot of a text message between them, in which Perry wrote to Aniston, “Making you laugh just made my day. It made my day.” The last slide was a video of a Friends scene between their characters Rachel Green and Chandler Bing, where the best buddies told each other that they loved one another as Rachel prepared to move to Paris. Though it was an emotional moment between them, Perry’s character still managed to elicit laughs from the audience.
On October 30, Jennifer, David Schwimmer, Matt Leblanc, Lisa Kudrow and Courteney Cox provided a statement to PEOPLE in response to the news of Perry’s death. He was found in his jacuzzi at home on October 28 and was pronounced dead.
“We are all so utterly devastated by the loss of Matthew,” the actors said in their statement. “We were more than just castmates. We are a family.”
