Who is Lizzy Caplan's husband? Matthew Perry reflected on his relationship and heartwrenching separation from actress in memoir
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Following their split in 2012, Matthew Perry appears to have never spoken to his ex Lizzy Caplan again.
The ‘Friends’ star revealed this in his 2022 memoir, ‘Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,’ which was released a year before his death.
View this post on Instagram
Though Perry does not mention Caplan by name in the book, multiple references point to the actress.
Perry was apparently disheartened when Caplan broke off their relationship over an email before she got married to Tom Riley in 2017.
Who is Tom Riley?
Tom Riley is a renowned British actor, producer, and director who has appeared in motion pictures, like ‘The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window’, ‘The Nevers’, and ‘Da Vinci’s Demons’.
During the production of the film 'Allied' in London in 2015, Lizzy Caplan first crossed paths with her current spouse.
Just one year after they’d met, Riley popped the question to Caplan which led to the two tying the knot in 2017, and four years later, they welcomed their first child, Alfie in 2021.
"I have a baby and am married," Caplan, 41, told People in May 2023. "That part of my life is the most important part of my life, where in the past, work was the most important part," she added.
When did Lizzy Caplan and Matthew Perry meet?
Caplan and the ‘Fools Rush In’ actor first crossed paths when she was 23 and he was 36.
View this post on Instagram
"In fact, I knew she was twenty-three because I’d crashed her twenty-third birthday party. Our subsequent initial make-out session was in the back of a really messy Toyota (to think I’d spent all that money on fancy cars and here I was in the backseat of a tan Corolla),” he recounted.
“When we were done, I said, ‘I’m gettin out of the car now. Mostly because I’m thirty-six.’
“So began two years of probably record-breaking amounts of sexual intercourse, with no strings attached, both of us following the friends-with-benefits rule to a tee,” he continued.
“We were on the same page. We never went to dinner, we never talked about each other’s families. We never discussed what went on in each other’s lives regarding other people. Instead, it was texting, and saying things like, ‘How about Thursday night at seven?'”
View this post on Instagram
Perry and Caplan were seen together at a few public events but otherwise kept their relationship status relatively discreet throughout this period.
But after two years of being "friends with benefits," they decided to make the relationship official.
“(It) had morphed into love. This was one of the most ‘normal’ periods of my life. True, occasionally I’d have little slips, taking maybe two OxyContin, from which I’d then have to detox for six days,” Perry wrote.
“But the relationship had deepened to the point where there was now a question I urgently needed to ask her.”
“One day, I said, ‘I think we should stop kidding ourselves. We love each other,’ and she didn’t disagree. I did love her, very much,”
“That said, our intimacy issues are being sidestepped by the fact that we were both really into working. My fear of her leaving was still deeply in place, too, and who knows, perhaps she was scared of me leaving her.”
Perry was on the verge of making it permanent at one point.
He decided to propose but changed his mind at the last minute.
He paid "a huge amount of money" for an artist to paint the two of them for Christmas.
Because the first four years of their relationship were "both sex-and-text driven," he learned from his business manager that he and Caplan texted "something like 1,780" times.
So he requested the artist to draw that many hearts next to a picture of her reading a copy of the New York Times and clutching bottled water, with Perry dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and holding a Red Bull and an edition of Sports Illustrated.
"I loved this woman, and I wanted her to know it,"
He said "will you..." when he handed the gift, but then "immediately went into Chandler f - - king Bing mode" and "missed the moment."
Years later, in 2017, the actress from ‘Mean Girls’ married Tom Riley.
Perry invited her to watch his play, ‘The End of Longing,’ in London around that time.
“The woman I’d dated for six years was, by now, dating a British guy, and they were spending half the year in London, the rest in Los Angeles. We were still friendly enough that we’d had a couple of lunches and texted a few times. Knowing that she was in London, I’d invited her to see ‘The End of Longing,’ but she’d texted back that she was way too busy,” Perry recalled.
“‘I’ll see you Stateside!’ she wrote. I replied that I was a little hurt that she couldn’t make it — the play was being performed in her town, for God’s sake — and then a while later I got back an email telling me that she was getting married and that she had no room in her life for friends.”
That was their final interaction, according to Perry.
“I never replied to that email, and we’ve never spoken since. It was an incredibly harsh way to reveal the news that she was getting married, and not something that I would ever do to a person, but there you have it,” he penned.
“Even still, I will forever be planted in her former. I’m glad she got married and that she’s happy,”
“I want nothing but the best for her, forever.” he concluded.