'I was broken, bent, unlovable': Matthew Perry reveals reason he broke up with Julia Roberts
MALIBU, CALIFORNIA: Former 'Friends' star Matthew Perry revealed how he pursued Julia Roberts via hundreds of fax messages before breaking up with her out of concern that she would leave him. The star started a relationship with the Oscar-winning actress after she made a guest appearance on 'Friends'. They dated from 1995 to 1996.
Perry told The Times, "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.' Not only did Julia agree to do the show, but she also sent me a gift – bagels, lots and lots of bagels."
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While Perry was filming a movie in France, 'The Pretty woman' star began what she now referred to as a "three-month courtship" after accepting an offer to appear in a special episode of 'Friends' in Season two. Daily faxes were exchanged during this time. They had already become a couple when the episode's filming began. In his upcoming autobiography, 'Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing', Perry writes that before email became popular, they communicated via hundreds of messages.
Perry writes, "Three or four times a day I would sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive. 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 new fax had arrived. Nine times out of ten, one had."
Perry eventually started dating Roberts, but he dumped her two months after she made an appearance on the show. He admitted, "Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unlovable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts. 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."
Perry admitted that five years after their breakup, he watched Roberts win an Oscar for her performance in 'Erin Brockovich' while he was "sweating and twitching" in a rehab facility with other patients. He wrote, "As she made her speech, a voice rose in that room in that rehab, urgent, sad, soft, angry, pleading, filled with longing and tears. I made a joke. 'I’ll take you back,' I said. The whole room laughed, though this was not a funny line in a sitcom. This was real life now. Those people on the TV were no longer my people. No, the people I was lying in front of, shaking, covered in blankets, were my people now."
His book 'Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing' is expected to be out on November 1.