The “Daring and the Beautiful” star Maeve Quinlan only has nice memories of her relationship with the late Matthew Perry.
The actress, 59, opened up in regards to the “Friends” star — who died in October 2023 on the age of 54 — with Soap Opera Digest recently, claiming he was “100% sober” once they were together.
The “Serving Sara” actor died from “acute effects of ketamine,” in keeping with his autopsy report.
Quinlan and Perry were together from 2002 until 2003 after meeting at a tennis game, with the latter battling substance abuse throughout his life.
“We got on like a house on fire,” she lovingly recalled.
The soap star actually knew of the Canadian actor before their initial meeting, calling him “the lovable guy by the elevator.”
The 2 lived in the identical apartment constructing in Los Angeles when he first started off in Hollywood. But it surely wasn’t until Perry scored his hit role of Chandler Bing within the 1994 NBC sitcom that Quinlan realized who he was.
“I had the most important crush on him, but I never saw him again because by the point the show was picked up, he had — like every actor does — moved to the Hollywood Hills,” she told the outlet.
“When Matthew and I launched into a romantic relationship he was 100% sober and was very open about his previous struggles,” she said.
“That was his one fully sober yr, and we were practically inseparable. One in every of the explanations he liked being with me was that I didn’t do drugs,” the “South of Nowhere” alum went on, adding that she “never” saw him drink or do drugs during their courtship.
In 1997, the “Fools Rush In” actor became hooked on Vicodin following a jet-ski accident. He entered rehab that very same yr.
He then relapsed in 2001 and went to in-patient rehabilitation once more in an effort to combat his Vicodin, methadone, amphetamines and alcohol abuse problems.
In keeping with Quinlan, they stayed friends and were essentially “like brother and sister” after they split.
“He was the guy that each guy wanted to hang around with and each girl wanted to this point,” she said. “He was the guy round the corner.”
Despite his star quality, Perry was often times “sort of unsure of himself.”
“He wasn’t, imagine it or not, completely confident with girls, although he dated the likes of Julia Roberts,” Quinlan added.
Perry dated a medley of girls, including the Oscar winner, 56, in 1995, in addition to model Yasmine Bleeth and Lizzy Caplan.
“I had no idea how much he was internally struggling because his most important focus was all the time making other people completely satisfied and laughing,” she said.
But in the previous few years, the 2 grew further apart, with Perry “not even trying to achieve out” although Quinlan desired to when he released his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.”
“I regret to at the present time that I didn’t call Matthew to inform him I used to be happy with him,” she told the outlet. “It took a lot of guts and bravado for him to write down that book and be so brutally honest.”
It was when the “Dirty Girl” star came upon about Perry’s passing last yr that she was “devastated.”
“It wasn’t a shock but I still couldn’t imagine it happened. And although we hadn’t seen one another in a while, I miss him very much,” she said. “He was truly a close friend.”
Knowing him “sober was the best gift of all,” she fondly remembered. “Because the years went on, so lots of us lost Matty little by little to his disease — and the necessary a part of that sentence is that it’s a disease.”