Kristin Davis Recalls Being Set Up With Matthew Perry in the '90s: 'He Was So Happy'

On the latest episode of her iHeartRadio podcast Are You a Charlotte?, the Sex and the City star revealed that an attorney once introduced her to the late Friends actor at a dinner party in the late '90s.

"He's not my lawyer, but he's a nice lawyer, and I've been set up with Matthew Perry," Davis told guest Brian Van Holt on Monday's episode. "And this is like '98, '99, '97 maybe. I feel like it was between Melrose Place, which I did before Sex and the City, and it was at a house. It was a dinner party. It was so low-key."

At the time, Davis was coming off her breakout role as Brooke Armstrong on Melrose Place, while Perry was starring on the massively successful Friends, which premiered in 1994.

"It's a bunch of Hollywood people. I don't even know who was there other than this lawyer and Matthew," Davis recalled. "Matthew's lovely. He sits next to me. And he's talking about how thrilled he is, how happy they are on the set at Friends, and he was doing a film with Salma Hayek. I was like, 'Wow, he's so happy.'"

For Davis, the encounter was a stark contrast to her own workplace experience at the time.

"I had been around Melrose [Place]," she explained. "It wasn't the happiest place in a way and it was, like, stressy. There were 15 series regulars, everyone had the feeling they might get cut or whatever. So I was like, 'Wow, that's amazing, you're so happy.'"

While nothing romantic ever came from their setup, Davis remembers that one night vividly, especially once the dinner ended.

"They start just passing the pot around and I'm like, 'Ohhhh,'" she said, referring to marijuana. "I just get super paranoid and unhappy and time stops. It's a horrible experience."

The actress admitted she often felt out of place in Hollywood’s party scene.

"I wasn't really cool ever. I was like, 'I hope I can still succeed without doing all this stuff,'" she said of the era's drug scene. "And it was not clear in the '90s if you could. It was a lot going on."

Davis, of course, went on to land her iconic role as Charlotte York in Sex and the City in 1998, leading to roles in other films, along with her return as Charlotte for two feature films from the franchise and the recently cancelled SATC spinoff, And Just Like That…

Perry, meanwhile, remained with his beloved as Chandler Bing on Friends, while also starring in several films during that time, and after. He tragically died, however, in October 2023 at age 54 from the acute effects of ketamine.