They famously showed a loyalty to each other that was rare in Hollywood – Friends onscreen, and off it, too.

Indeed, when the six stars of the legendary sitcom negotiated their mega-bucks pay deal – asking for a then unheard of $1million per episode in 2002 – they got it, because they stood as one. And when they left the series together in 2004, they never spoke a public word about each other that wasn’t imbued with love and respect.

Little wonder, then, that when one of their number, Matthew Perry, who played wisecracking Chandler Bing, died aged 54 following a ketamine overdose in 2023, they again stood together in grief. Now a three-part Netflix documentary entitled The One About Matthew Perry is being released, which reveals the depths of the cast members’ desolation when they attended their tragic co-star’s funeral. And the Daily Mail understands the result is an extraordinary insight into the affection in which Perry was held and the profound grief that the Hollywood machine, which some would argue helped precipitate his downfall, could not save him.

Speaking for the first time about her brother’s death, the actor’s younger sister Mia Perry Bowick, to whom he was exceptionally close, tells the Netflix show: ‘At the funeral we arranged for it to be open casket for all of us and that was when we completely broke down.

‘The funeral was very small, family and close friends only – and then the rest of the Friends cast all walked in together. I hadn’t seen them in easily over 20 years. And Jen Aniston was the first one to come over and give me a huge hug and then they all did and then all five of them walked up to the casket holding hands and they stood around him crying.’

One might then expect the co-stars to also describe that awful day – and their friendship – onscreen. But none of the three episodes, to be released next week, contains a single word from any of the five surviving Friends; Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer or Matt LeBlanc.

Why, you might think, did none of them appear in tribute to their much-loved Matty? After all, the show is filled with figures from Perry’s life. Their abiding love for him is palpable. Did one of the Friends refuse, and so all felt they had to? For her part, Mary Robertson, who directed the documentary, said: ‘I know the Friends actors love Matthew, and grieve Matthew. We did ask them if they would participate, and they decided not to.

‘I think everyone grieves in their own way. And I understand why someone might feel that this isn’t the moment to talk.’

A source close to Aniston told showbiz website Page Six that she ‘doesn’t want to relive it and have it be so public’.

And there is to relive. Over three poignant episodes, the footage charts Perry’s early years trying to break into Hollywood, his complex relationship with fame and his pitiful descent into drink and drug abuse.

From his early devotion to a young actress in his circle called Marjorie Harris Newman – whom he was trying to impress when, drunk, he crashed the car in which they were driving – to his disbelief at briefly dating A-lister Julia Roberts, the documentary charts his path to self-destruction.

Doug Draizin, who produced the 1997 romantic comedy Fools Rush In, starring Perry and Salma Hayek, when the actor was at his peak of Friends’ fame, says it was not clear something serious was amiss. 

Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Draizin said: ‘I didn’t know anything about [Perry’s] problems, including him being given drugs by a doctor, other than getting calls from the wardrobe department about his fluctuating weight. He’d go from a size 40 to a 36. I thought maybe he had flu or something,’ he said.

The movie had been a turning point moment in Perry’s addiction journey. Already struggling with alcohol – he’d started drinking at 14 in reaction to the emotional turbulence that accompanied his parents’ divorce and by 18 was imbibing daily – circumstances then led him to become severely dependent on painkillers. During a break in filming in 1996, the actor sustained back injuries while jet-skiing and was given the painkiller Vicodin (an opioid with paracetamol) by a doctor.

‘I couldn’t believe how good I felt; I was in complete and pure euphoria,’ Perry wrote in his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. ‘It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had. Nothing could ever go wrong.’

He later expanded on this, saying, ‘And then I started kinda feeling sick when I wasn’t taking them… then you take three, and then you take four…’

Perry later speculated that if he hadn’t been introduced to Vicodin, the next 30 years of his life would have been dramatically different. But then, as friends and family tell the documentary, Perry’s addictions had their roots in complex insecurities.

Harris Newman, who befriended him in the late 1980s, says: ‘I think Matthew was searching for something internal to be soothed or filled…

‘I learned about how secretive he was about the drinking; that he would drink by himself. Alcohol probably quieted that very deep part of himself that always thought he was not enough and I think he felt that becoming famous would fill that hole. But even though he became a superstar there was still something in his psyche that couldn’t be soothed.’

And he certainly tried to address that void. His sister Mia – who latterly trained as a grief counsellor – says: ‘He spent about $7million [£5.233million] over his lifetime trying to get sober. It just paints a picture to me of overall, how serious he was about his disease and how desperate he was to be sober.’

Indeed, Perry himself said that those millions included the cost of 14 stomach surgeries, 15 stays in rehab and therapy twice a week for 30 years. He also estimated he had attended approximately 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Known for his obsessive personality – spending many hours just recording his answering machine message, for example – the frustration of trying to beat his addictions must have been crippling.

Jeff Strauss, a writer/producer for the first series of Friends who helped shape the character of Chandler, contributed to the documentary and also spoke exclusively to the Daily Mail this week, recalling how Perry ‘brought a wonderful vulnerability to the roles he played.

‘Chandler knew who he was and he wasn’t entirely comfortable with that guy. I think in some ways that was also what Matthew was challenged with.

‘I think people who want to be famous really feel like they want to be seen. But whether being seen by millions of people is what they need is a whole other thing and I think that’s what Matthew struggled with.’

He paints a portrait of an endearing, thoughtful man, who never failed in even the smallest of social graces.

‘I would see Matthew years later on studio lots and if he saw me first and from a hundred yards away he would shout and flag me down, no matter how famous or busy he became,’ he told the Daily Mail.

‘He had that easy-going manner despite whatever struggle is going on inside, and both those things can be true about a person at the same time.’

No doubt the excesses that go hand in hand with the world of celebrity didn’t help Perry’s addictions. The director Jonathan Lynn, who worked with Perry and Bruce Willis on the film The Whole Nine Yards, also took part in the Netflix documentary and recalled his time working with the star.

Lynn recalled: ‘One day Matthew came in looking really terrible. I thought he was in denial about his drinking and pills.

‘Like he could keep it under control as long as the work’s going really well – if anything went wrong, he would immediately turn to alcohol or pills. On all the films I’ve made, there’s always been a few people who drank a bit too much but this was different.’

His sister Mia remembers this period too, saying: ‘We started to hear that he was struggling to manage his drug addiction while working on the Friends set.

‘He didn’t want anyone to know that he was on something and would take just enough for him to feel OK but not enough to appear high – which was tricky… he would need to manage his withdrawal systems, tremors between takes. It was just the norm,’ she told the documentary.

‘If Matty was struggling, Dad would go and pick him up… I think there were a lot of parts of Dad that felt like he really owed a lot to Matthew for not getting to be there when he was younger.’

Perry often spoke about the trauma he felt growing up at being separated from his father, an actor, who lived in LA – thousands of miles away from his home in Canada where he lived with mother and stepfather.

‘The only way I would get to see my father was on TV… he would call up and say: “I’m on this show,”’ Perry once said.

Mia also recalls how her brother’s struggle to quit his vices was cyclical, telling the show that the anniversary for attempting sobriety always fell around her birthday, but that Matthew could never quite make it for a year.

Yet the impact he had on other addicts, whom he met at various stages of potential rehabilitation, was often profound.

Restaurateur Tim Harrington, who met the actor in 2001 at an AA meeting and went on to become a close friend, tells how Matthew invited him to move in with him, saying: ‘He saved my life right in that moment’. They lived together for a year and their daily routine was to attend an AA meeting in Hollywood in the morning, before going to lunch, and then discussing their next meeting.

Matters came to a head, however, in August 2018, when after years of opiate abuse, Perry’s colon ruptured in several places.

As sister Mia tells the documentary: ‘He had a colostomy bag. He aged 20 years in three months. He could barely walk.’

Round-the-clock nurses and sober companions followed.

‘He was just constantly surrounded by people caring for him,’ said Mia. Sepsis followed and it was touch and go whether he would survive. He fell into a coma, and remained in hospital for three months. Everyone hoped this would turn out to be his much-needed wake-up call. But, in truth, the final chapter of his demise had already begun.

When he left his LA hospital bed, he required constant carers. One of them was Kenneth Iwamasa, previously Matthew’s manager’s long-time assistant. At first, Mia tells the Netflix show, her family thought he was the answer: ‘When he started working for Matthew after the surgery to repair his colon we were all really happy about it and we thought it was a really good fit. Matthew really really trusted him and they were together every single day.’

Iwamasa, who had no medical training, was later found to have worked with two doctors to provide the actor with more than £38,000 worth of ketamine in the weeks before his death, and injecting the actor with the drug.

In May, Iwamasa was jailed for 41 months for conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death.

Three years on from Perry’s tragic death in a hot-tub, the waves of grief experienced by those who so loved him have hardly begun to abate.

Draizin has nothing but praise for the man he first met in the late Nineties. He told the Daily Mail: ‘I had watched Friends, and I knew Matt hadn’t carried a movie before, but I went to meet him and we clicked. He was nervous.

‘I think he felt that he had a lot to prove. He asked a lot of important questions about the character he was going to play. There was no prima donna stuff. He wasn’t interested in any relationship with anyone in the movie and he locked the door [of his trailer] after he did his stuff. [But] he did get very close with my son Ryan, who was 11 at the time, and they’d play Wiffle ball [a game akin to baseball] on breaks. He was a considerate and genial guy.’

Strauss told the Daily Mail that ‘with everything that went on with Matthew, it was important that the people who saw him for who he was, separate from fame and infamy and struggle, get to say how much he was loved’.

And although they may not have appeared onscreen, that is undoubtedly a sentiment shared by the five remaining Friends.

• The One About Matthew Perry is available on Netflix from October 27