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As one of TV's most impactful shows, Friends is a sitcom that virtually everyone has checked out at least once. The show has iconic lines, memorable moments, and storylines that people loved and loathed.
Matthew Perry was dynamic as Chandler Bing on the show, and he recently penned a memoir opening up about everything, including the show.
The actor revealed how he crafted CHandler's memorable delivery style, and we have all the details below!
'Friends' Is An Iconic Part Of Television History
In a decade that boasted shows like Seinfeld, Frasier, and a plethora of classic TV shows, the argument could be made that Friends remains the biggest of the bunch.
Debuting in 1994 on NBC, and quickly taking over the pop culture sphere, Friends is a classic case of the right show coming out at the right time. The formula was laid out with Living Single, but once Friends tweaked it, the show became a powerhouse on television, that is somehow as relevant as ever.
When dishing on what made the show so successful, Matthew Perry said, "It was a character-driven funny, not timely funny. They didn’t make timely jokes. They didn’t make jokes about O.J. Simpson. They made character-driven jokes about people – and people are going to come back time and time again and watch that.”
The cast of Friends was supremely talented, and they were all perfect for their roles. Few, however, were as good of a fit as Matthew Perry was for Chandler Bing.
Matthew Perry Was Brilliant As Chandler Bing
According to ScreenRant, several solid performers were up for the role of Chandler, including Jon Favreau, but Perry got the gig, and he made the most of it.
While reading the script, Perry knew that Chandler was his.
"It was as if someone had followed me around for a year, stealing my jokes, copying my mannerisms, photocopying my world-weary yet witty view of life… It wasn’t that I thought I could play “Chandler”; I was Chandler," he wrote.
With the role secured, Matthew Perry delivered the goods each week on the show, even if it came with an overwhelming amount of pressure.
“I felt like I was gonna die if [the live audience] didn’t laugh. And it’s not healthy for sure. But I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh, and I would sweat and… and just, like, go into convulsions. If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get, I would freak out. I felt like that every single night," he said during the show's reunion.
While there are many memorable moments that Perry captured as Chandler Bing, the thing that still stands out the most is Chandler's unique vocal delivery. It's one that is recognizable to virtually all, and Matthew Perry opened up about the way he crafted it.
How Matthew Perry Got Chandler's Iconic Delivery Down And Why He Changed Things Up
According to Perry, per Deadline, "I was talking in a way that no one had talked in sitcoms before, hitting odd emphases, picking a word in a sentence you might not imagine was the beat. I didn’t know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades. For now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance. (I was once told that the writers would underline the word not usually emphasised in a sentence just to see what I would do with it.)”
Thanks to his work, Perry was able to stand out, and as we mentioned already, his delivery is one of the most iconic parts of the show.
Eventually, the actor grew tired of it.
"That particular cadence — could it be more annoying? — had been so played out that if I had to put the emphasis in the wrong place one more time, I thought I’d explode, so I just went back to saying lines normally, for the most part in Season 6 and then beyond,” he wrote.
The show was wise to keep it in place, as it's since become iconic.
Chandler Bing is an iconic part of TV history, and it's largely thanks to what Matthew Perry was able to do with his delivery. Few characters in history have a style as recognizable as this one, a nod to Perry's exceptional work.
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