Julia Roberts Looks Back at Relationship with Matthew Perry Amid Actor's 'Heartbreaking' Death

In a new interview with Entertainment Tonight, Roberts who dated Perry briefly in the mid 1990s, called his death "heartbreaking," telling the outlet she's doing her best to move forward in a positive direction.

"The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking," Roberts said of her ex, who died on Oct. 28 at the age of 54. "I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can."

Roberts also reflected on her brief stint on Friends, where she guest starred as a childhood classmate of Perry's Chandler Bing in the 1996 episode, "The One After the Super Bowl."

"All good thoughts and feelings," the 56-year-old actress said of her experience on the beloved sitcom.

"They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of a one-off character and it was a really fun time," she continued.

Perry touched on the couple's "three-month-long courtship" in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. It began, Perry wrote, when Roberts was considering her guest role on Friends.

"I sent her three dozen red roses and the card read: 'The only thing more exciting than the prospect of you doing the show is that I finally have an excuse to send you flowers,'" he recalled in the book, going on to detail the timeline of their relationship.

"Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive," Perry wrote. "I was so excited that some nights I would find myself out at some party sharing a flirtatious exchange with an attractive woman and cut the conversation short so I could race home and see if a new fax had arrived."

Perry was completely taken by the Pretty Woman actress, praising her for her wit and intellect.

"It was like she was placed on this planet to make the world smile, and now, in particular, me. I was grinning like some 15-year-old on his first date," he wrote.

He noted that by the time they filmed her episode, they were already a couple. Perry also recalled a February 1996 appearance from Roberts on The Late Show With David Letterman where she jokingly confirmed their romance, describing the TV star as "awfully clever and funny and handsome."

But the relationship was short-lived, with Perry noting that he found himself single just two months later.

"Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me," Perry recalled. "Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable."

The pressures of dating such a famous star were all too much for Perry, and ultimately made him decide to break up with her.

"Instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts," he wrote. "She might have considered herself slumming it with a TV guy, and TV guy was now breaking up with her. I can't begin to describe the look of confusion on her face."

Roberts went on to marry Danny Moder in 2002. The couple welcomed twins Hazel and Phinnaeus in 2004 and son Henry in 2007. Perry, for his part, was engaged to Molly Hurwitz from 2020 to 2021.