Maggie Wheeler played Janice, Chandler’s sometimes girlfriend and then a thorn in his side, for all ten seasons of Friends. She was close to Matthew Perry and his drug overdose death in 2023 devastated her, especially since she had also lost a brother to drugs.
Wheeler talked about her sadness on the Still Here Hollywood with Steve Kmetko podcast. She believed that a recent encounter she’d had with some wildlife was a sign sent to her from Perry that he and her brother were still part of the world. It was a very poignant moment for her.
«Lots of people talk about spirits showing up as birds and, you know, other things that kind of send a message when someone passes,» she said, via Entertainment Weekly. «And after Matthew died, I was in a neighbor’s pool, and I was alone, and there was nobody else around. And I was on my back, and I was thinking about my brother. And I said, you know, ‘Look out for him,’ and two hawks flew over my head and flew past me. One circled around and came and got the other one, and it flew past me. So that was a beautiful moment, if you go for that kind of stuff.»
Perry passed away in his hot tub on October 28, 2023. He had struggled with addiction all his life, and wrote about it extensively in his autobiography, titled Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. The whole entertainment world was devastated to have lost part of one of the most beloved and famous sitcom casts of all time, but few felt the loss more keenly than the other five Friends. Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow and Courteney Cox all attended Perry’s funeral.
«The ripple, the wave was felt by so many,» Wheeler said on the podcast. «For me, I felt just heartbroken and sad that, you know, that he couldn’t make it out of this incredibly dark tunnel that he was in for so long. And if you read Matthew’s book, you know the level of his addiction was so profound.»
Wheeler Believed Perry Was Getting Better Before He Died
Wheeler thought that Perry was starting to climb out of drug addiction before his shocking death. «Even when you know the road somebody is on, the day you know they’re gone still comes as a surprise, even when you think you are preparing for it. And in Matthew’s case, he seemed to have turned a corner,» she said. «Things seem to have been going well in certain kinds of ways. There’s just that feeling of like the rug being pulled out.»
Others also believed Perry had «turned a corner». Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman believed he had gotten sober. “He was happy and chipper,” she said on CBS’s Today, via The Guardian. “He didn’t seem weighed down by anything. He was in a really good place, which is why this seems so unfair.” Sadly, though, Perry wasn’t sober. His death now stands as a testament to how insidious drug addiction can be.
