By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | December 20, 2023 |
By Emily Richardson | Celebrity | December 20, 2023 |
Do you know what sucks? Achieving your goals. Sure, you finally get what you want, but, ultimately, it solves nothing. “If I lose 50 pounds, I’ll love my body.” UNTRUE. “If I get a promotion, I can chill out at work.” FALSE. “Once I get a boyfriend/girlfriend, my confidence will skyrocket.” HA. Fool! In a new interview with Deadline, George Clooney talked about the late Matthew Perry, and how his Friends stardom never actually brought him happiness.
In 1994, George and Matthew were starring in two new NBC shows: ER and Friends. 62-year-old George recalls standing “side by side on the soundstage”: “We were all really close. We were at the upfronts in 1994 in New York.” George initially met Matthew a decade before, when they were both up-and-coming actors. Matthew was 16, George was in his mid-twenties, and they’d play paddle tennis (hmmm, early pickleball?) together. George says:
He was a great, funny, funny, funny kid. He was a kid and all he would say to us, I mean me, Richard Kind and Grant Heslov, was, “I just want to get on a sitcom, man. I just want to get on a regular sitcom and I would be the happiest man on earth.”And he got on probably one of the best ever. He wasn’t happy. It didn’t bring him joy or happiness or peace.
Damn. George says he noticed things were off with Matthew on the Warner Brothers lot:
And watching that go on on the lot — we were at Warner Brothers, we were there right next to each other — it was hard to watch because we didn’t know what was going through him. We just knew that he wasn’t happy and I had no idea he was doing what, 12 Vicodin a day and all the stuff he talked about, all that heartbreaking stuff.
George says Matthew’s experience is proof that “success and money and all those things” don’t “automatically” come with happiness: “You have to be happy with yourself and your life.” So true.
George adds that, when it came to sudden fame, he had “a good example of what not to buy into”, thanks to his aunt, Rosemary Clooney. George says he didn’t know the singer very well, but stayed in her house when he first moved to LA. Rosemary gave him “a really good lesson in how little success has to do with you”:
My aunt was the biggest singer in the business in 1950. And female singers, I think they made up about seven of the top 10 singers at the time.And then rock and roll came in. She was on the road and she believed it when everybody told her how brilliant she was. And then when she came off the road and she was ready to record again and they’re like, where have you been? And she’s like, what are you talking about? I’ve been working the whole time. But now, rock and roll was a male-dominated sport. And she was done.
For 20 years she did a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking. She ruined her life for a period of time because she believed the first part where she thought she was brilliant when she was 19, then she had to believe the second part, which told you how she’d lost all her talent. Of course, she didn’t do any of those things. She ended up having an incredible career later as a wonderful jazz singer, but she had to come to terms with all that stuff.
George says that, maybe, his aunt’s experience helped him adjust to fame. He relates this back to Matthew’s struggles:
So I know what Matt Perry had, and maybe part of it is what he didn’t. I know his family was in the business, but maybe there wasn’t that thing that said, this is going to go in waves where our careers are concerned. The people who I loved and got to know, Paul Newman and Gregory Peck, they’d always talk about how your career is not constantly going up. There are down moments, and struggles. And then it comes back up and you got to ride it all out.
As for Matthew’s addiction to opioids, George says that the Sackler family “should actually go straight to f*cking jail” for spreading “one of the great killers in our history”:
We’ve had these horrible, addictive moments going back to morphine after the Civil War. And when a million guys came home with one leg and they were all addicted to morphine, this is that same idea, where they paid people to say it’s not addictive. Are you kidding me?
Damn, George Clooney gives good interview. Here’s George and Noah Wyle playing hot doctors on Friends in a kinda-sorta ER crossover. Monica and Rachel are pretending to be each other for wacky insurance scheme purposes: