Minnie Driver pens heartfelt essay honoring Matthew Perry’s legacy

Minnie Driver paid a heartfelt tribute to her former co-star and close friend Matthew Perry two months after his tragic death.

Writing in the Guardian, Driver, 53, shed light on the late Friends star’s life, remembering him as a beacon of light and hope for those around him.

Despite harboring his own demons, Driver noted, “The thing about [Perry] was he was like a light.”

“He was one of those people who just made other people feel good,” she reflected.

The Good Will Hunting actress acknowledged the depth of Perry’s “sadness” and “pain,” chillingly noting, “I know now that his pain was great.”

Perry passed away on October 28 this year – when he was just 54 years old – and his cause of death was recently determined to be “acute effects of ketamine” mixed with opioid-like drug buprenorphine, which is meant to treat opioid addiction and to ease pain.

Indeed, Perry openly spoke about his struggle with substance abuse and depression around the peak of his Friends fame – detailed in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

For Driver, the candid memoir was “incredibly hard” to read, and she found herself having to “put it down and pick it up again” as “it felt unbearable, how much he suffered.”

However, Driver reflected that Perry found a form of catharsis in not only writing but releasing his memoir, upon which he “got to have the experience of how much people loved that book, and loved him.”