Julia Roberts, 56, broke her silence on ex Matthew Perry‘s death in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight. The Oscar winner, who briefly dated Matthew for three months in 1995 after she guest starred on Friends, said it’s “heartbreaking” that Matthew died so unexpectedly.
“The sudden passing of anybody so young is heartbreaking,” Julia said in the interview, published December 4. “I think that, you know, it just helps all of us just appreciate what we have and to keep going in a positive way as best we can,” she added.
Julia also reflected on her experience appearing on Friends as a former childhood classmate of Matthew’s character, Chandler Bing. “All good thoughts and feelings,” she shared. “They were all so welcoming to me as just a kind of a one-off character and it was a really fun time.”
Before his death, Matthew wrote about his relationship with Julia in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. He said they had a “three-month courtship” where they sent each other letters via fax. “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 a new fax had arrived,” Matthew wrote.
After three months of dating, Matthew decided to end things with the Pretty Woman star. “Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me,” he wrote in his memoir. “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.”
Matthew died at the age of 54 on October 28. Since his passing, so many stars have shared tributes to the late actor, including his former Friends co-stars Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, and Matt LeBlanc.