The four words Jennifer Aniston told Matthew Perry that 'hit him like a sledgehammer'.

They played dear friends for 10 seasons of television and it sounds like life very much intimated art for Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston.

The actor passed away at the age of 54 on October 28 in 2023.

To mark the first anniversary of his tragic death, Aniston shared a collage of photos of Perry on her Instagram, simply captioned "one year". The post included a link to the Matthew Perry Foundation which was established after the actor's death to help those struggling with addiction.

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A post shared by Jennifer Aniston (@jenniferaniston)

Following his death in 2023, Aniston a tribute to her friend on her social media.

"Oh boy this one has cut deep," she began. "Having to say goodbye to our Matty has been an insane wave of emotions that I've never experienced before. We all experience loss at some point in our lives. Loss of life or loss of love.

"Being able to really SIT in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep. And we loved him deeply. He was such a part of our DNA. We were always the six of us. This was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be. For Matty, he KNEW he loved to make people laugh. As he said himself, if he didn't hear the 'laugh' he thought he was going to die. His life literally depended on it. And boy did he succeed in doing just that. He made all of us laugh. And laugh hard.

"In the last couple weeks, I've been pouring over our texts to one another. Laughing and crying then laughing again. I'll keep them forever and ever. I found one text that he sent me out of nowhere one day. It says it all."

"Matty, I love you so much and I know you are now completely at peace and out of any pain. I talk to you every day… sometimes I can almost hear you saying 'could you BE any crazier?'"Rest little brother. You always made my day."

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Two days after Perry's death, Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer released a joint statement to People.

"We are all so utterly devastated by the loss of Matthew. We were more than just cast mates. We are a family," their statement said. "There is so much to say, but right now we’re going to take a moment to grieve and process this unfathomable loss."

"In time we will say more, as and when we are able," they continued. "For now, our thoughts and our love are with Matty’s family, his friends, and everyone who loved him around the world."

A year before the actor's untimely death, he spoke warmly in his memoir about his friendships with his Friends co-stars, and in particular, how Jennifer (or Jenny, as he often affectionately called her) supported him over the years.

Matthew and Jennifer became co-workers in 1994 when they were cast on the TV show of a lifetime, Friends, alongside David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, and Courteney Cox.

The six stars would be quickly catapulted into superstardom, becoming household names and their personal lives tabloid fodder.

Perry admitted in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, that he had a huge "crush" on Aniston upon meeting her, initially hoping she felt the same.

"I was immediately taken by her (how could I not be?) and liked her, and I got the sense she was intrigued too — maybe it was going to be something," he wrote.

Perry asked Aniston out on a date but "she declined (which made it very difficult to actually go out with her), but said that she’d love to be friends with me, and I compounded the compound by blurting, ‘We can’t be friends!'"

But they did become fast friends, even if Matthew did admit that in the early seasons he was "still crushing badly" on Aniston. The 17 Again actor eventually got over his crush when he realised she was interested in another Friends co-star: David Schwimmer.

He said on The Jess Cagle Podcast in November 2022 that he "knew what was going on" between his co-stars and so his feelings for Jennifer eventually "dissipated".

Watch the interview here. Post continues after video.

Both Aniston and Schwimmer confirmed on the Friends 25th anniversary special that they had a mutual crush on each other when they played TV's ultimate will they/won't couple, Rachel and Ross.

Further into Perry's memoir, he recalled a moment on the set of Friends when Aniston confronted him over his alcohol addiction, a struggle with substance abuse and sobriety that Matthew has spoken openly in the years since.

He wrote that he thought he had convincingly hidden his addiction from his co-stars, until one moment shifted everything.

"'I know you’re drinking,'" Perry recalled Aniston telling him. "To be confronted by Jennifer Aniston was devastating. And I was confused. 'How can you tell?' I said. I never worked drunk. 'I've been trying to hide it,'" he said.

Aniston's response hit him like a freight train. "'We can smell it,' she said, in a kind of weird but loving way, and the plural 'we' hit me like a sledgehammer," Perry wrote.

Despite this moment, Perry maintains that the whole cast were his pillars of support during his years of addiction.

"[They] were understanding, and they were patient," he wrote in his memoir.

"It's like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That's kind of what the cast did for me."

In a 2022 interview with Diane Sawyer, he spoke further about Aniston's support over the years. "She was the one that reached out the most. You know, I'm really grateful to her for that," Perry said.

Their friendship was not without its bumps, as in 2015 it was reported that both Perry and LeBlanc did not get invited to Aniston's wedding to Justin Theroux.

"It was a surprise to me as well," he told People. "They're a lovely couple, and I'm happy for them... I wasn't invited. So what can you do?"

But they reunited in 2019 on Friends 25th: The One With The Anniversary, along with the four other stars of the show.

Aniston spoke about her friend on the Today show in response to some revelations that came out on the anniversary special. "I didn't understand the level of anxiety and self-torture [that] was put on Matthew Perry, if he didn't get that laugh, and the devastation that he felt."

On the special, Matthew said that the pressure to make the live audience laugh was something that hit him hard. "To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn't laugh and it's not healthy, for sure," he said on the reunion.

At this admission, Lisa Kudrow was left stunned, telling Perry "You didn't tell us that then."

During the Friends reunion, Matthew got emotional when describing the connection the six co-stars still have with each other.

"The best way that I can describe it is after the show was over, at a party or any kind of social gathering, if one of us bumped into each other, that was it. That was the end of the night. You just sat with the person all night long and that was it," he said.

"You apologised to the people you were with, but they had to understand you had met somebody special to you and you were going to talk to that person for the rest of the night. And that’s the way it worked."

Perry's cast mates nodded in agreement.

"It's certainly the way it worked with all of us," Perry said.

This article was originally published on October 31, 2023 and has since been updated.

Feature image: Getty.

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