SPOILER ALERT: This post contains conversation about all three episodes of “The One About Matthew Perry,” now streaming on Netflix. At the end of Netflix’s new docuseries “The One About Matthew Perry,” director Mary Robertson can be heard saying something off camera. Robertson is the first to say she doesn’t believe in things she can’t see.
But having spent months with the memories of Perry told through his loved ones, she admitted to one of the people who knew him best that he was more than just stories to her after this process. I felt Matthew when I was interviewing Mia, especially when we were speaking about how he would want the film to end. Her sense of Matthew is so sharp and so intimate and so present tense, and she did such an incredible job of bringing us close to her experience with him through her words and her emotion and her honesty.
Not only with her voice, but through the photographs and the videos that she has. One develops a sense of Matthew’s presence, and I believe that he was present for me at the very end.” Bowick has never spoken openly about her brother’s decadeslong struggle with addiction, but now shares the full scope of Perry’s life from inside the family, including their relationship as half siblings who share the same father, actor John Bennett Perry. The series charts Perry’s meteoric rise from being a working actor to a global comedic star, thanks to “Friends” and his character Chandler Bing, and what ultimately becomes the biggest role of his life –– an advocate for addiction rehabilitation while continuously suffering from the disease himself.
She also gives new details about private moments, including repeated visits to see him in rehab and being at his bedside in 2018 after his near-fatal colon rupture. Robertson commends Bowick’s candor across her two interviews, the first of which spanned two days of filming. At the start of the project, though, Bowick had expressed her anxiety to Robertson.
After the release of Perry’s 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” Robertson and her Maxine Productions team reached out to his publisher and several people within his inner circle about making a documentary. It wasn’t until Perry’s tragic passing in 2023, from the acute effects of ketamine, that she renewed her efforts and ultimately got traction among those close to him. Bowick was not the first to sign on, but ultimately became the lynchpin for Robertson to feel it could be a substantial project.
Also important were the voices of Perry’s closest friends, Roger Castillo and David Pressman. Robertson says Castillo signed on first, after many calls and conversations, and they flew him out to Los Angeles for the interview. Only after that did she get to plead her case to Pressman.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
