Matthew Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing in Friends, has reportedly died, aged 54. According to a report on TMZ, which cited law enforcement sources, the actor was found drowned at his home in Los Angeles on October 28, 2023.

Sources say first responders rushed to his home on a call for a cardiac arrest. He was apparently found in a jacuzzi. Sources also said there were no drugs found at the scene. No foul play is suspected. The actor long battled drug addiction, and in his searingly honest memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published in November 2022, chronicled the physical toll his drug use had taken on his body. Perry estimated that he'd spent around $9 million “trying to get sober”. In his book he admitted: “I have lived half my life in one form or another of treatment center or sober living house.” And, after an incident where his colon exploded and he fell into a coma, he wrote that “I should be dead”.

But he also believed that his survival gave him a purpose: helping others. “I can help a desperate man get sober,” he wrote. “After all, it's the only thing I've found that truly feels good.”

His death at 54 follows a long acting career. The son of actor John Bennett Perry and journalist Suzanne Perry, Perry got his first break in 1979 in 240-Robert, at the age of 10. Small roles—including one episode of Beverly Hills 90210—followed for the next 15 years, until he was cast as Chandler Bing in Friends.

The series, which ran for ten seasons until 2004 but has endured in popularity for the two decades' since, made him globally famous. But the show also marked his spiraling drug and alcohol addiction. In an interview with CBC in 2022, he said he “can’t watch the show back” because all he saw were the physical signs of his disease.

“I was taking 55 Vicodin a day, I weighed 128 pounds, I was on Friends getting watched by 30 million people—and that’s why I can’t watch the show, ’cause I was brutally thin,” Perry said. “I didn’t watch the show, and haven’t watched the show, because I could go, ‘Drinking, opiates, drinking, cocaine,’” he said. “I could tell season by season, by how I looked. That’s why I don’t wanna watch it, because that’s what I see.”

During Friends' decade-long run, Perry capitalized on his fame with a move into films, with The Whole Nine Yards, and Fools Rush In, among others. Even though after Friends ended his television and film career faltered, his popularity never waned.