Matthew Perry recalls watching ex-girlfriend Julia Roberts accept Oscar from rehab

In his upcoming memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry recalled being in rehab and watching his ex-girlfriend Julia Roberts win the Best Actress Oscar for Erin Brockovich, per PEOPLE.

While he was recovering in Marina del Rey in California, Perry recalled that he heard Robert’s name called out at the 2001 Academy Awards. After kissing her then-boyfriend Benjamin Bratt, she walked to the stage to accept her award.

“As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry, pleading, filled with longing and tears, arguing with the universe while God calmly tapped his cane on the hard, cold world,” wrote Perry.

“I made a joke. ‘I'll take you back,’ I said. ‘I'll take you back.’ The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now. And I was lucky to have them. They were saving my life.”

The Friends alum noted that he was “incredibly happy” for Roberts but also “grateful” that he lived to see another day. “When you are at the bottom, the days are long," he added. "I didn't need an Oscar, I just needed one more day.”

According to The Times, Perry, 53, revealed that the two started dating shortly after Roberts, 54, signed on to guest star on the ’90s NBC sitcom. However, he wrote that the Pretty Woman actress “would only do the show if she could be in my story line,” adding that he “had to woo her.”

Perry, however, let his insecurities get the best of him and broke up with Roberts two months into their relationship.