Julia Roberts has broken her silence on the death of her ex-boyfriend, Matthew Perry.
The late “Friends” star died of an apparent drowning on October 28. He was 54.
“The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can.”
Roberts, 56, and the “Whole Nine Yards” star became friendly in the early 1990s shortly before Roberts starred in a guest role on the show’s second season.
“They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of a one-off character and it was a really fun time,” she told ET of the “Friends” cast.
She added: “All good thoughts and feelings.”
In Perry’s 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Things,” he revealed that Roberts only agreed to star in the hit NBC show if her character would somehow fit into Chandler Bing’s story arc.
At the request of the show’s producer Marta Kauffman, he further encouraged Roberts to appear on the show by sending her roses and a personal card.
“Thus began a three-month-long courtship by daily faxes,” the “Serving Sara” star wrote. “This was pre-internet, pre-cell phones – all our exchanges were done by fax. And there were many; hundreds.”
“Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive,” Perry added.
According to the “17 Again” actor, he became “captivated” by what the future Oscar winner wrote.
“The way she strung sentences together, the way she saw the world, the way she articulated her unique thoughts, all was so captivating,” Perry recalled.
According to “The Odd Couple” star, the faxes between the two actors “veered romantic” before morphing into “five-hour” phone calls. She then showed up on his doorstep one day.
“When I opened it, there she was, there was a smiling Julia Roberts on the other side. I believe I said something like, ‘Oh, that’s Julia Roberts,’” Perry remembered.
In 1996, the couple split as a result of the “Fools Rush In” actor’s drug and alcohol addiction making him feel like he was “not enough” for the actress.
“Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me,” Perry wrote in his memoir. “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. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts.”
As The Post previously reported, Perry was found submerged in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home just after 4 p.m. in late October.
According to officers at the scene, the actor was unresponsive and was declared deceased at the scene. The LA County Medical Examiner’s Office labeled Perry’s manner and cause of death as “deferred” pending additional tests that are likely to take months to complete.
Following his romance with Roberts, Perry went on to date Lizzy Caplan for six years, and was briefly engaged to literary manager Molly Hurwitz from 2020 to 2021.
