Just one day after news of Matthew Perry’s tragic death, one of his oldest friends, Hank Azaria, answers the door.
Azaria, 59, took to Instagram on Sunday to reveal that Perry, 54, was “the first friend I made in Los Angeles.”
“When I moved there, I was 21, he was 16. We did a pilot together called Morning Maggie, which never saw the light of day, but Matthew and I became very good friends,” Azaria added.
‘For a long time we were really more like brothers. We drank together a lot. We laughed a lot together. We were there for each other in the early days of our careers,” Azaria added.
“To me, he was just as funny as he was in Friends, and other things too. Personally, he was just the funniest guy ever,” Azaria recalled.
Opening: Just one day after news of Matthew Perry’s tragic passing, one of his oldest friends, Hank Azaria, opens up
First friend: Azaria, 59, took to Instagram on Sunday to reveal that Perry, 54, was ‘the first friend I made in Los Angeles’
‘He lived to laugh and every night he was… he was like a genius. He started weaving comedic threads together, just hanging out,” Azaria added.
“A joke here, a joke there, a joke here, a joke there, and by the end of the night he wove them all into a climax of hilarity,” Azaria explained.
He added: “Most nights you spent with Matthew you were crying laughing by the end. I really loved him. “Many of us close to him really thought we had lost him long ago to drugs and alcohol,” Azaria explained.
“As he documented in his book, in his autobiography, there was so much suffering. I had to pick up that biography and put it down eleven times, it was so painful for me to read,” Azaria admitted.
“It was really… as his friend who loved him, I knew he had to suffer, but the details of it were just devastating,” Azaria admitted.
He added that he has been sober for seventeen years, and that “the night I went to AA, Matthew brought me in.”
“The entire first year I was sober, we both went to meetings together, and he was such a great… I had to tell him this, as a sober person he was so caring and giving and wise and he completely helped me be sober,” Azaria added.
“And I really wish he could have found it in himself to go through sober life more consistently, but as a person in recovery it was hard to read that too,” Azaria admitted.
Genius: ‘He lived to laugh and every night he was… he was like a genius. He started weaving comedic threads together, just hanging out,” Azaria added
Most nights: He added that “most nights you spent with Matthew, you were crying with laughter by the end. I really loved him. “Many of us close to him really thought we had lost him long ago to drugs and alcohol,” Azaria explained
David: Azaria played David, Phoebe’s (Lisa Kudrow) love interest in Perry’s groundbreaking hit series Friends
‘I just felt so bad. I mean, I knew he was in and out for years, he documented it all publicly and then in the book, but it’s heartbreaking for those of us who loved him and knew him very well personally. We just missed him,” Azaria said.
“It’s one of the terrible things about this disease, it just takes away the person you love, and you know, professionally, as an actor, he was so brilliant,” Azaria said.
“I wish me and the world could have had what the rest of his career would have been,” Azaria concluded.
Azaria played David, Phoebe’s (Lisa Kudrow) love interest on Perry’s breakout hit series Friends.